Git-annex assistant: Like DropBox, but with your own cloud

by urza on 8/15/2012, 1:41 PM with 51 comments
  • by sciurus on 8/15/2012, 3:17 PM

    Joey blogs his progress on git-annex assistant in detail at http://git-annex.branchable.com/design/assistant/blog/

    Here's a post from his personal blog that hints at how he can afford to work on this project for a year on only $20,000- http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/notes_for_a_caretaker/

  • by tomku on 8/15/2012, 2:15 PM

    Very cool, but I suspect that making it user-friendly and slick will end up being much more difficult than implementing the actual functionality was.

    Edit: I have another question/concern, does the implementation in Haskell mean that the end product will have a runtime dependency on GHC or the Haskell Platform?

  • by dt7 on 8/15/2012, 2:14 PM

    This seems quite similar to SparkleShare: http://sparkleshare.org/

    Edit: Oops, SparkleShare is mentioned on the page. Looks like this will work better with larger files. He does mention that SparkleShare is a GUI and not 'just a folder', although in my experience it is 'just a folder', like Dropbox.

  • by Johngibb on 8/15/2012, 4:43 PM

    This sounds similar in practice (not implementation) to AeroFS [1] which is a peer to peer syncing service. Just make one of your peers something cloud-based and reliable.

    Very interesting space!

    [1] https://www.aerofs.com/

  • by rlpb on 8/15/2012, 2:19 PM

    I'd love to hear Joey's answer on this question: why Haskell?

  • by rsync on 8/16/2012, 12:56 AM

    rsync.net will fully support Git-annex (it was brought to our attention a month or so ago by our friend Jason Scott).

    We're excited about this project.

  • by jt2190 on 8/15/2012, 4:26 PM

    At first glance, OwnCloud seems to be similar:

    http://www.owncloud.org/dev/sync-clients/

    (That said, git-annex assistant looks very cool.)

  • by Gustomaximus on 8/16/2012, 3:33 AM

    This is similar to the features Opera launched in 2009

    http://www.opera.com/press/releases/2009/06/16/

  • by timtadh on 8/15/2012, 2:58 PM

    I didn't look closely at the kickstarter page but I use gitdocs[1] which is basically works like dropbox but syncs to a git repository. It works ok for my (light) usage.

    [1] https://github.com/bazaarlabs/gitdocs

    [edit] It looks like git-annex solves the large binary blob problem with git (which I don't think gitdocs does) so maybe they could be integrated?

  • by jblemee on 8/15/2012, 4:33 PM
  • by on 8/15/2012, 4:43 PM

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  • by omgmog on 8/15/2012, 4:23 PM

    This seems to do what Sparkleshare does, except Sparkleshare uses Github - http://sparkleshare.org/

  • by rjzzleep on 8/15/2012, 2:16 PM

    i'm not sure if git is the right thing to choose to version big binary files.

  • by BruceIV on 8/15/2012, 2:47 PM

    Maybe this is really juvenile, but does the logo look like a bladder to anyone else?