Date: 2012dec19 Keywords: self-hosted Q. Are there any alternatives to Dropbox? A. Some people call it Cloud Storage. With Dropbox, you get 2GB for free or 50GB for $10 a month. It has clients for all platforms. You place a file in a folder on one device and it shows up in the same folder on another device - that's the magic. There are lots of choices: Microsoft Live Mesh

- You get 5GB for free (which is more than Dropbox) - In my testing, it slowed down the computer - Windows only http://www.mesh.com

SugarSync

- Cheaper than Dropbox You get 5GB for free and the other other prices are better too. - Can you select which folders to sync (Dropbox only does one).

But this makes it a bit confusing.

- Every platform - In my testing, it worked OK on Windows but was a bit heavy on Android. https://www.sugarsync.com

JungleDisk

- Uses your own Amazon (or Rackspace) S3 account. Which means 15 cents per GB. - They charge $2/month for the using the program. - Desktop platforms only. So looks you'll need something else for mobile. http://jungledisk.com

OwnCloud

- Looks to be the leading open source competitor - You can run it on your own server - with huge disk - Included as a regular package in Linux distros http://owncloud.org/

Sparkshare

- Open source - Written in C# so requires Mono on Linux - They have plans for all platforms but only Linux and Mac now - Uses git as a backend which is bad for binary files. But backends are plugable so that may change. http://sparkleshare.org/

FtpBox

- You don't have to pay for a server if you already have one - Your existing webhost may already do ftp. - Windows only - I like that it uses open protocols - In my testing, it didn't work every well. I assume it will improve. http://ftpbox.org

Rsync

- An old classic. - Not easy to setup. - Sync is one way - You can use it with http://rsync.net/ but that's not cheap - This is what I use for backup.

More info http://www.tomsguide.com/us/cloud-storage-service-computing,review-1539.html