Title photo
frugal technology, simple living and guerrilla large-appliance repair

Regular blog here, 'microblog' there

Many of my traditional blog post live on this site, but a great majority of my social-style posts can be found on my much-busier microbloging site at updates.passthejoe.net. It's busier because my BlogPoster "microblogging" script generates short, Twitter-style posts from the Linux or Windows (or anywhere you can run Ruby with too many Gems) command line, uploads them to the web server and send them out on my Twitter and Mastodon feeds.

I used to post to this blog via scripts and Unix/Linux utilities (curl and Unison) that helped me mirror the files locally and on the server. Since this site recently moved hosts, none of that is set up. I'm just using SFTP and SSH to write posts and manage the site.

Disqus comments are not live just yet because I'm not sure about what I'm going to do for the domain on this site. I'll probably restore the old domain at first just to have some continuity, but for now I like using the "free" domain from this site's new host, NearlyFreeSpeech.net.

Thu, 19 Jul 2012

I thought SpiderOak could replace Dropbox, but that didn't work for me

I was prepared to embrace SpiderOak as a more secure, better-suited-to-me backup/syncing service than Dropbox. I thought I'd like the ability to sync any directory/folder, and not just items under /dropbox.

I've been using Dropbox for a few years now, and I recently installed and ran SpiderOak on my Debian Squeeze desktop.

While the SpiderOak software seems to be undergoing fairly consistent improvement, I found it hard to configure and use, and when I unknowingly exceeded my 2 GB file limit, the service basically broke and I couldn't seem to either pay for more space or get access to bring the amount of data I had on the service under the 2 GB limit. And yes, I did contact SpiderOak for help.

Dropbox is extremely enthusiastic about supporting Linux, the /dropbox "limitation" makes it easy for me to regulate what I do and don't store with the service (though I'd like the option of selective syncing across the filesystem like SpiderOak).

In the end, it was a combination of service, reliability and software -- I really like the way it works -- that keeps me using Dropbox. I suppose you can throw in familiarity.

Had my SpiderOak experience gone better, I'd probably feel differently (or indifferently).

And now that Dropbox has doubled the amount of data you can store (or halved its prices, depending on how you look at it), the service is more attractive than ever.

It certainly makes my work across multiple computers a lot smoother and trouble-free.

Posted: Jul 19, 2012 7:30pm UTC

permalink | comments

Category: /backup/dropbox/

Breadcrumb trail to post: home > backup > dropbox

No previous posts | No more posts