Ask HN: Alternatives to Dropbox?

10 points·nimbius··13 comments

I have a Synology NAS and I'm using their Drive app to access all my data everywhere. It can sync like Dropbox, though on my desktop PC I just mount the volume to ~/Documents.

Is a static IP needed for that?

No, Synology has a DynDNS-type thing that can work with dynamic IPs (QuickConnect). Also note that Tailscale has an official Synology package, so you could have your own private mesh VPN to access your data anywhere.

There are many alternatives (Synchting, synology, nextcloud, Resilio, etc). The problem is securing the server for access over the internet. Dropbox has a large team of engineers to secure their servers, can you also?

Otherwise the experience with Synology Drive was good. It was also faster because the server is nearby.

In some cases USB thumb drives, Blu-Ray burners, etc.

I've seen people use Dropbox to share files in the same office and physical media is fine with that. It is faster for me to make a Blu-Ray and send it to you by FedEx then upload a 30GB machine learning model over my DSL line.

You can build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.

I moved from Dropbox to Nextcloud hosted on a Hetzner server years ago. Haven't looked back since.

cloudflare r2. if your primary use case for dropbox is the same as mine: publicly shareable links to large files.

OneDrive

Google Drive

Nextcloud

Syncthing is epic!

I like pcloud

Google Drive.

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