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
 ____________________________________________________________________
 ambassa...@fourthworld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com

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