Jonathan Arbib

I needed a solution to easily share my documents from my home computer, to my laptop, and also have them available on the web… Manually syncronizing was not an option, and other solutions such as rsync were not user-friendly for a day-to-day use…
Finally I found two solutions able to give me what I needed:
Dropbox and iFolder!

Dropbox stores your files on their server (or in the cloud… depending how you look at it!) and gives you a client which synchronizes a folder on your local computer with the server and any other computer linked to that account. Dropbox also allows sync’ing over LAN, which greatly improves performance for large files if two computers are on the same network! There is a size limit of 2GB for free accounts. Dropbox clients are available for Windows, OSX and even Linux!

iFolder on the other hand allows you to “own” your files and host them on your own private machine. This removes also any space constraints that Dropbox gives you, as the limit is your drive, but adds the problem of being limited by your server’s connection speed, as you are limitied to the badwidth available where your server is. Hosting or colocating will help you overcome that barrier!

Personally I currently use dropbox as I have not (yet) installed a working xen virtual machine with iFolder to deploy on my server. When that happends I might move to iFolder.