So it's a cool project, but not really what I'd say is a Dropbox replacement.

1 TB is roughly 20-30 USD per month at AWS/GCP only in storage, plus traffic and operations. R2 is slightly cheaper and includes traffic.

Compared to e.g a Google AI plan where you get 5 TB storage for the same price (25 USD/month) + Gemini Pro thrown in.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

I'd rather control the whole stack, even if it means deploying my own hardware to one or more redundant, off-site locations.

Edit: Are there robust, open source, self-hosted, S3-compliant engines out there reliable and performant enough to be the backend for this?

How much on S3? A LOT more.

I am using it with Hetzner Storage Box[2], which is insane value for money at 11 euro per 5 terabytes per month.

[1]: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash [2]: https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box/

https://www.seafile.com/en/home/

It's pretty magical. It nails the "online" vs "cloud only" paradigm via the SeaDrive client. I have it running on my file server, and now all my machines have access to terabytes of storage with local performance, since it can cache a subset of your content locally.

And since I can run the server on my LAN, the throughput is way better than Dropbox would be too.

Sure, ChatGPT can help, but to use it reliably, you still need enough medical knowledge to ask good questions and evaluate the answers.

I'm a kid in a candy store playing around with this stuff.

File sync can't be that hard! Enters the first 3 way conflict and everything explodes.

Dont misunderstand me, this is a cool idea. But if your rotation time between ideating a project and pushing it to HN is a week, you don't understand the problem space. You didn't go through the pain of realizing its complexity. You didn't test things properly with your own data, lost a bunch of it and fixed the issues, or realized it was a bad idea and abandoned it. I have no guarantee you'll still be there in a month to patch any vulnerabilities.

Not that any open-source project had these kind of guarantees until now, but the effort invested in them to get to that point was at least a secondary indicator about who built it, their dedication, and their understanding of the space.

For everything else I use paid onedrive subscription. The biggest problem is user interface with s3 like storage and predictable pricing because remember you also pay for data retrieval and other storage apis, with dropbox etc you pay a fixed amount. Every year or so I roll over data into the bucket.

But for infrequently accessed data its fine.

But you have to pay for your own S3 bucket as well... and it's generally several times more expensive per terabyte, though this depends on different factors. (Not to mention you might still have to pay for Google if your e.g. Gmail doesn't fit into the free tier anymore.)

If this is supposed to be financially motivated, the creator seems to have it somewhat backwards.

Dropbox is a lot more than file storage. The syncing itself has been through serious tests to characterise its behaviour. Sure, some may not like the decisions taken to direct its sync behaviour one way or another but at least all these are known through formal testing.

Isn't that compromises the whole purpose of the project immediatly?

Moreover, any reasonably adequate dev would work on expansion of syncthing ecosystem, not inventing a rasclet instead of a wheel

Example 2TB:

Google $10/mo vs S3 ~&45/mo?

You could get cheaper that Google Drive with glacier tiers but that’s a different level of restrictions and still has retrieval fees.

Feature request: Google Drive for desktop.

That is the feature that gives your drive as a mounted file system that stream files as you need them.

It gives me the ease of having access to a giant amount of files stored in my gdrive without having to worry about the space they take up locally nor moving files up and down.

Actually, what solutions to that might already exist? I don't really use the web UI of gdrive as much as use it as a cloud disk drive.

For a better alternative, run MinIO on a cloud provider of your choice, or stick with a secure option like Proton Drive.

This is in Go, exposes both webdav and SFTP servers, with user and admin web interfaces. You can configure remotes, then compose user space from various locations for each user, some could be local, others remote.

Doesn’t require an external database (just a s3 bucket) and is a single binary. A webui is shipping in the next few days.