> The entire point of a Dropbox type service is off-site cloud backups.

No, it isn't. The entire point of Dropbox is having a shared folder on multiple devices that keeps itself in sync. "Cloud backup" aspect is a side effect, but it's too easy to break that "backup" accidentally.

WRT. SyncThing, it's not for regular people not willing to expend any effort at all to set it up and keep it running, but in our adtech-driven startup economy in technology, these regular people are doomed to be ripped off and abused. Such are the aggregate ethics of this market.

There's some famous HN quote when Dropbox launched about how it would could be implemented "quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs and blah blah blah..."

Actually back then Dropbox was pretty neat an there was no way my dad could implement that himself, and even for us nerds, it would be a major hassle to set up and keep running... so Dropbox had real and obvious value.

My point replying here was that now, under some circumstances anyway (see below), it now really is quite trivial for regular people not willing to expend any^W much effort at all to set it up and keep it running. (It is less than one minute of one-step installing and then configuring Syncthing.)

However the thing I missed, as pointed out in some of these comments, is that not everybody has a machine at home that is on all the time.

I do, and I set up an iMac for my dad and sister etc and told them to just leave it on all the time and just let the screen sleep after an hour.

I think a lot of people do that, and I think it is a good idea in general, but if you don't want to do that, then yeah in that scenario Dropbox still does have some value.

> quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs and blah blah blah...

This quote has haunted me for quite some time until I realised the best way to solve the Dropbox problem lay in the UNIX philosophy with at least: a storage component + a sync component + a web UI component

At that stage, it becomes a game of lego in a healthy ecosystem of tools. As I was just missing the web UI component, I built it: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash

> I think a lot of people do that, and I think it is a good idea in general

My experience is the opposite. I don't know a lot of people who have a machine turned on 24/7.

Additionally, I think that leaving a client machine running 24/7 is not a good idea, considering heat/consumption, (potential) noise and wear.

Also, I think other people missed one point in this discussion. If one has a local filesharing server, and carries a machine (laptop/tablet) out, they need to sync immediately every time when they come back home. It's a hassle.

I do have a 24/7 server, and used to have a filesync service on it, but all things considered, a free Dropbox account turned out to be the most conventient choice.

Yeah, I think I've realized just because me and most of my friends do it, and my family all does it (and of course they do because I give all of them a new iMac for Christmas every 5 years or so and set it up for them), probably not as many people do this as I think.

(Strong disagree that it's a bad idea though; it's super handy, all your windows are just where you left them and your email is already there before you sit down at the computer. iMac machines in particular are highly reliable and will happily run continuously for many years beyond the time frame you'd still want to use them. Seconds matter.)

But anyway, the main point of this reply is to say that with Syncthing you never need to sync immediately, or manually at all, in this scenario. If I take my laptop out and work at a cafe or something, it syncs continuously and flawlessly, and when I get back home my iMac Pro is already totally up-to-date.

It's only when you do some work with huge files on an airplane with no connectivity, or something like that, where you might need to make sure you turn it on again when you land and make sure it is on and connected to the internet to make sure all the changes get synced back to all the other machines.

If you have at least one always-on machine, Syncthing is just as convenient, but objectively superior (security and price being the biggest two). If you don't want to or can't have one always-on machine, then that might be a reasonable use case for Dropbox for file sync.

Syncthing is peer to peer replication, you don't need a server online 24/7, you just might choose to if you have a small number of devices and you want changes to replicate immediately, not hours later or whenever two devices are online at the same time.

You don't stricly need a server 24/7, but you need the peers with changes to be connected at the same time, which is inconvenient (that's why a server 24/7 is ultimately needed).

If one applies changes on a machine, then switch to another, they must ensure to leave them on for a brief time to allow syncing, then turn off the previous one. If they don't do this, they'll (likely) get conflicts.

If one's requirement is not to entrust a 3rd party with one's own data, of course, cloud/proprietary solutions are excluded, but to expect open/local solution to be as convenient as the former, is just false.

It completely depends on use case, you're only going to get conflicts if you modify the same files on different devices before they've had time to sync.

If you're using it to collate photos from different sources for example, that's fine. If you're trying to collaborate on a document, yes, of course, it's the wrong tool.

That’s a huge caveat: most people do not have multiple computers and even if you do, it leaves a lot of room for data loss if you have to go wake your desktop up before your laptop’s data is safe.

I said 'devices' not 'computers' - a popular use case is synchronising phone photos to a computer.

If you only have a single device you're probably not in the market for a cross-device file synchronisation program!

(Like Dropbox, it's not really a backup tool - bad data will be replicated just like good data. Also like Dropbox it does have versioning, but that's still not really a replacement for regular snapshotting IMO.)

My point was that for most people, a sync limited to unused space on an inconsistently available device is not a replacement for a cloud service. In the scenario you mentioned, your phone is likely not to lose too much data as long as you use your laptop nearby frequently but the reverse isn’t true unless you have only a modest amount of data which fits on the phone. It also leaves you far more exposed to correlated failures since the same compromise, flood, mugger, etc. is likely to get both devices.

(Malware is also why I really like Dropbox’s minimum retention period since it breaks the ransomware model)

Hmm, I never thought of that as the main point of Dropbox; I always understood the main point was syncing files between your different machines, e.g. desktop at home and laptop, or home and work, etc.

For dead-easy "regular person" backup, I would recommend something like Backblaze.