(off) dropbox down

[Richard Gaskin]

Mike Kerner wrote:

 > For everyone who does anything with dropbox, it's been down since at
 > least 2AM EDT.

For this morning:

Network outages for popular services can often be tracked using 
third-party tools.  Searching Google for "is dropbox down" led me to 
this report confirming that many others have reported similar issues 
with Dropbox today:

http://downdetector.com/status/dropbox


For this afternoon:

Nextcloud - can't say enough good things about it.  Free and open 
source, available here:

https://nextcloud.com/

[Pardon the long pitch, but it's a free package and a really good one:]

Ever since I started using it I've stopped using Dropbox, Google Drive, 
and other services I'd used in the past.  Why?  Better sync, more 
flexible options, and completely under my own control all the way down 
to how much storage space I want.

Nextcloud is a PHP package that installs under Apache.  As such it's not 
yet an end-user consumer product (a partnership with Western Digital is 
in the process of producing one), but is very well suited for anyone 
comfortable with setting up Apache.

Dual-licensed like LiveCode, the GPL edition is probably more than 
adequate for the needs of most readers here (though the Enterprise 
edition has some components that may be worth considering if you're 
running a larger business).

You install Nextcloud on any VPS or dedicated server, and once installed 
you're limited only by your server's disk capacity.

You can set up any number of user accounts, establish disk quotas for 
them if needed, and share files between them or even publicly. You can 
sync any number of folders, and synced folders maintain versions when 
files change so you can revert to any earlier version at any time.

Nextcloud has native clients for Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android.

I originally tried it as a solution for syncing my LiveCode Plugins 
folder across all the machines I work on, and as the only option with 
native clients for all three OS families that alone made it an instant 
favorite.

Since then I've discovered that it includes a considerable number of 
apps, included an embedded version of LibreOffice, contact, photo 
management, etc., with more available from their third-party collection.

I had the pleasure of meeting the project founder and director, Frank 
Karlitschek, at the SoCal Linux Expo a couple weeks ago, along with the 
project's community manager and head of marketing, Jos Poortvliet.  Both 
fun-loving, hard-working people, committed to the vision of putting 
people back in control of their cloud systems.

Until they get a turnkey consumer device shipping, Nextcloud may not be 
for everyone just yet.

But for developers in an increasingly interconnected world that already 
has us configuring Apache, Nextcloud can be a very good solution for 
cloud storage and more.

If nothing else, consider:

When a public cloud service like Dropbox goes down, your only recourse 
is to wait and pray.

If your Nextcloud server goes down (and mine never has in the many years 
I've been running it), chances are you'll just reboot and be back in 
business in minutes.

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems
  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
  ____________________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com