acmeattic-devel team mailing list archive

[Karthik Swaminathan Nagaraj <nkarthiks@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hey Guys,
      I was looking for use-cases and sharing models that AcmeAttic should
provide. I came across interesting differences between the two famous online
backup providers.
I don't know if you guys have used DropBox, but paranoid I was I had never
tried DropBox myself though I knew what it did.
Let me summarize my findings.

*DropBox:*

   - Creates a 'DropBox' folder somewhere on your computer.
   - Any file that you need to be backed up/synced needs to be put inside
   your dropbox folder.
   - Or, you can choose one folder to be your Dropbox folder
   - All your clients would sync this dropbox folder between them


*SpiderOak:*

   - It recognizes all your clients individually by names (that you assign)
   - You can share *any* folder anywhere on your machine. These folders can
   be disjoint. All sub-folders are implicitly shared.
   - SpiderOak maintains all revisions for all the shared files/folders on
   this machine.
   - Every client has its *own* shared folders. These are *not* synced among
   themselves by default (makes sense as they are different machines).
   - You can always download any data from any of your clients.
   - *Sync* is a separate feature in SpiderOak. You create a sync folder by
   selecting two folders from two different machines (or a machine and a
   external HDD)
   - All files in this sync folder is synced between all machines. In
   essence, this is an instance of a DropBox folder.
   - You can create as many sync folders as you want.

I have not explored the sharing feature as yet, but SpiderOak offers
something called a ShareRoom which you can create and (possibly) pick
files/folders to share.

Bottom line: I think we should build our application based out of SpiderOak
which is much more superior in terms of features. I like their share and
sync model which cleanly separates the use-cases. Personally, I would find
use for *both* those features.

Did you guys know about these as yet? I am quite interested in framing up
our application scenario first. Atleast a vague idea of the features.

-- 
Karthik

PS: We should probably try to find more competitors and interesting features
that they provide. Imitating features is probably the first step toward
competition, and easiest :D