4 ways to deploy your own Dropbox counterpart

Want to get cloud storage, but have more control over your service than you could get from Dropbox and its competitors? Here are a few ways to create your own Dropbox-style storage.

The first method is based on the use of GlusterFS, the second uses Git to synchronize files. These projects are designed for Unix-like operating systems such as Linux and OSX, but some may also work under Cygwin .

Using GlusterFS

CloudFS's Jeff Darcy has written a tutorial on building your own Dropbox-like services using GlusterFS by mounting file systems from a remote server to a local computer. He uses Rackspace Cloud for his application, but notes that this should work on any virtual dedicated servers (VPS) (and, of course, not virtual servers either).

The disadvantage of this approach is the lack of offline access - that is, instead of synchronizing folders, we get a remote location that acts as a local folder. This can be solved using rsync or other synchronization applications.

Sparkleshare

SparkleShare is an attempt to create an opensource alternative to Dropbox for its own hosting. You can find the release candidate for GitHub . Unlike the GlusterFS approach, it provides you with offline folder synchronization. Porting to Windows and mobile platforms is also planned.

DVCS-Autosync

DVCS-AutoSync is another Git-based, open source Dropbox alternative that also supports Mercurial and other distributed version control systems. It provides more functionality than SparkleShare, but is a bit more complicated to install.

ownCloud

Details are a little sparse on the ownCloud site, but it is a KDE-based Dropbox alternative.
The site ownCloud quite a few details, but it is based on the KDE alternative to Dropbox.
Here is a list of features:

• File storage centrally on your computers
• Access from any device
• Online and offline (sync)
• Cross platform
• Automatic versioning
• Sharing with your friends
• Automatic backups
• Encryption
• Synchronizing your KDE Desktop Applications
• Desktop Integration
• Plugins for the player, photo galleries, RSS and much more

What else?

I am sure that there are still methods. How else can you build an alternative to Dropbox?