Is that a weakness of the tool's organizational model?

I don't want to be part of a community around my cloud storage. I want it to work and I want to think about it as little as possible.

I use Syncthing and it does a pretty great job at this, no one ever insisted I need to join a Syncthing community, yet it keeps on working.

I don't pay a dime for Syncthing but I'm vaguely aware that they're linked to a company called Kastelo which provides enterprise support for Syncthing deployments. Probably a lot of Syncthing development is paid for that way.

Incidentally I founded an open source consulting company that's totally unrelated to cloud storage. We have enterprise as well as smaller contracts. We develop some addons in-house and the bigger enterprise contracts tend to subsidize most of the work that goes into them. We haven't asked anyone to be part of a community and I don't think we need to.

Communities are nice, but if you want your software to last I think a good business model and a good marketing strategy are a better bet. Bonus, you can quit your day job.

Indeed. "S3 compatible" is the state of the art for object storage imho. As long as you can talk to a storage system that supports the basic S3 primitives, longevity is improved and there is no lock in. You can use S3 proper, Backblaze, Wasabi, Backblaze B2, local storage exposing an S3 api, etc. Any replacement is mostly drop in assuming it can read, scan, index existing objects.

Edit: @n3t heard wrt to the turn of phrase

>BUT there's another piece that makes or breaks these tools... whether they can >build a community around them and stick around for years...

Why ? who cares? if the tool solves the problem, you need a community maintain it. And that's it.

Running the docker variant, it is trivially easy, you just bump the tag version.

Been a user for around a decade. It is really great. Nextcloud was choking on large repos back in the day and it requires a beefier machine.

I first run Seafile on a cheap ARM board with 2GB ram and 2 core CPU.

> nextCloud and friends is a complete disaster in my oppinion.

Why is that? Have been using NextCloud in our company and for myself, and I couldn't be happier, no issues since 3 years, all the tools and plugins I need, sync running perfect and hassle-free and performant. I thought it's generally liked up until now - I didn't try any of the alternatives though, so they might indeed be better. Though I don't have any reason to try them tbh, as NC works almost too well.

I recently got into self-hosting Seafile and successfully set it up on my dedicated server. Had to think backup and security strategies quite a bit and ultimately I set up a bulletproof backup mechanism. Tested it pretty rigorously.

Seafile took me by surprise in terms of how quick it was at picking up new files and changes - syncing works incredibly well too. I moved all my files from my Google Drive into my Seafile instance and I'm now using it on all my devices as my main cloud storage solution.

Resilio is also pretty good, depending on your use case. (Syncthing is great too, but Resilio seems faster and better at NAT traversal in my experience.)

Same journey. I’ve been using seafile with seadrive and a subst to S: for years with very good effect.

Nextcloud suffers from flexibility, it's got a lot to offer but requires dialling in to your specific use case, the mistake most admins is to assume you can just run it without tuning, it has too many differing options to do that smoothly out of the box.

The ability to just run it in a snap has really contributed to this imho, Nextcloud is enterprise software you just happen to be able to run in your homelab.

running Nextcloud AIO has been reliable for me for a couple of years now.

I desperately want to be a fan of ownCloud, because it offers clients natively across Mac/Linux/mobile, but it’s such a mess. Every platform has small bugs and reliability problems that makes the whole thing useless.

I tried to install nextcloud once, and it was an exercise in misery.

IME NextCloud is a bloated PHP monster with poor performance. Twake seems to be leaner and have a narrower scope.

I'd add a fourth; "Make it easy to do backups and verify they're correct".

I don't think I've ever considered a data store without that being one of my top concerns. This anxiety comes from real-life experience where the business I worked at had backups enabled for the primary data store for years, but when something finally happened and we lost some production data, we quickly discovered that the backups weren't actually possible to restore from, and had been corrupted this whole time.

I'd like a manual "sync now" option. Sometimes I put stuff in google drive using windows explorer and it's not immediately obvious if it is syncing, why it is or isn't, or what I need to do to make it.

> 58.9% TypeScript and 32.6% JavaScript

Isn't that just 91.5% JavaScript?

TypeScript is not real.

this app is io bound and in that case it doesn't matter it runes on ts / js

It appears that the backend is written in TS, while the frontend in JS.

Personally I separate church and state by writing tests in JS and application code in TS.

If you're asking why these languages at all when this and that other language is faster, most likely it's less of a bottleneck than estimated.

Maybe ask all the startups looking to scale their TS\JS microservices "stack" using event driven architecture.

On Android isn't it "just" a share-targrt? You can make a PWA that's a share-target pretty easy.

How would you implement things like version history or shareable URLs to files without a database?

Another issue would be permissions: if I wanted to restrict access to a file to a subset of users, I’d have to make a group for that subset. Linux supports a maximum of 65536 groups, which could quickly be exhausted for a nontrivial number of users.

Take a look at "cockpit", because if there were, that's where it "should" be.

https://cockpit-project.org/applications

--

    With no command line use needed, you can:

    Navigate the entire filesystem,
    Create, delete, and rename files,
    Edit file contents,
    Edit file ownership and permissions,
    Create symbolic links to files and directories,
    Reorganize files through cut, copy, and paste,
    Upload files by dragging and dropping,
    Download files and directories.

> Do you really need a database for this?

I have no idea how this project was designed, but a) it's expectable that disk operations can and should be cached, b) syncing file shares across multiple nodes can easily involve storing metadata.

For either case, once you realize you need to persist data then you'd be hard pressed to justify not using a database.

I don't know of one- have thought this before but with python and fsspec. Having a google drive style interface that can run on local files, or any filesystem of your choice (ssh, s3 etc) would be really great.

... well, it makes sense to be able to do a "join" with the `users` and `documents` collections, use the full expressive range of an aggregation pipeline (and it's easy to add additional indices to MongoDB collections, and have transactions, and even add replication - not easy with a generic filesystem)

put all kinds of versioned metadata on docs without coming up with strange encodings, and even though POSIX (and NodeJS) offers a lot of FS related features it probably makes sense to keep things reeeeally simple

and it's easy to hack on this even on Windows

Perhaps they are using MongoDB GridFS instead of storing files on disk.

An SCP or FTP client maybe?

You expose SAMBA shares outside your home network?

I need to remind that the time when a service's tenant — be it a file, email, whatever else — automatically meant there was an OS user account for that user, has also been decades ago.

I'm unironically convinced that a basic Samba share with Active Directory ACLs is actually probably the best possible storage system...but the UI for managing permissions sucks, and most people don't have enough access to set it up the way they want.

Like broadly, for all configuration Hashicorp Vault makes you do, you can achieve a much more useful set of permissions with a Samba fileshare and ACLs (certainly it makes it easy to grant targeted access to specific resources - and with IIS and Kerberos you even have an HTTP API).

Can you name a single Google Drive clone that doesn’t use a database?

Would love to see your source code for your take on this product.

+1 for Syncthing. I've been running it for years, after my student discount for Dropbox expired (Google drive and OneDrive were just getting traction at the time).

The mobile experience last I tried was pretty rough though. I don't really need my files on my phone and I have a web interface on my home server I can use to grab them in a pinch, but it's something to keep in mind.

Syncthing is great, but no good for mobile devices if you want to store and access lot of large files - it syncs everything, and last I checked, the features to prevent that were depreciated.

Syncthing is easily the most effective FOSS I actively use. It just works and runs on everything.

I’ve had similar warnings from multiple very senior devs to never go near mongo. So better explain that choice if you’re wanting adoption. Reliability was the concern.

That looks great, thanks for sharing.

I would add to that list something like a splitwise alternative.

And open source too? Seems too good to be true.

USB sticks can fulfill part of the "2" in the 3-2-1 rule.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backup#3-2-1_Backup_Rule

I thought the same once, but apparently some of my friends literally do not own a PC. Only tablets or phones, no USB-A in the house except maybe in TV. Oh well, time for USB-C pendrives.

Not sure how i can collaboratively edit documents thanks to a USB stick.

Surely you jest. I love USB sticks. But they are not a proper alternative to cloud storage. For example, how do I do share select files/folders with select people, in other countries?

Until you lose it, break it, damage it accidentally (via high humidity, high heat, etc). Arguably, if you run twake on some VPS, you have additional layers of redundancy by default.

Isn't Mongo source available too? So it sort of seems to contradict the mission of this organization to use it.

You can always use FerretDB instead.

My first inclination too tbh.

And then I saw Npm references and thought “in JavaScript?!” But at least it’s typescript.

Mongodb used to suck. We use it at work for critical systems, it’s been rock solid for 3+ years.

why? since WiredTiger is the default storage engine it works

> Looks like there is a single commit where a majority of the code came from.

I do this all the time, right before open sourcing a project. Basically while it's private, commit quality can be a bit rough, and if I want to open source it, I'll remove .git, make a new init commit then open source it. No one needs to see what I do in my private abode :)

They were originally working on a MS teams replacement, with a bunch of things in one app like teams. (I tried it back then, it was pretty green). Now it looks like they are focused on drive, chat and email. The old app seems deprecated, so I presume they forked it into some of this new stuff.

> If you want to increase adoption, change the name: https://www.paulgraham.com/name.html

> If you have a US startup called X and you don't have x.com, you should probably change your name.

But they do own https://twake-drive.com/ already? What exactly is your point here? Either you misunderstand the linked article, or I do. But seems people would be able to find that just fine if they search for, as twake-drive.com comes up as the first result when I search for "Twake Drive".

Besides, Graham's articles are almost always geared towards startups in one way or another. This doesn't seem to be that, so not sure I'd even try to read it if I was the owner of Twake Drive.

Where was this guy when Mr Newel was setting up store.steampowered.com? Imagine how much more successful they'd be if they went with steam.com instead

It can go wrong too.

You search that in Google with file sharing keywords and the AI will helpfully correct it to 'do you mean GDrive?'

They would've lost a prospective user to a competitor while sounding like a knockoff of some other product.

Yeah - Twake is a terrible name though, tbf, I wonder what the use case is for open source cloud drive outside of pretty niche situations esp when the cost, in many cases, is for the infrastructure in part

I don't think that advice has been relevant anymore for awhile now.

You could also just run the node.js process via a `systemd` service and sandbox it that way using hardening directives.

It's really not clear: they seem to show a mobile app (https://static.tildacdn.com/tild3536-3661-4363-b433-35353561...) but there are no links to app stores anywhere, seems like they ended up on HN too early, maybe we should let them some time to get their stuff together

yes :)

it is not a new one, it used to be called Cozy drive before.

since it's I/O heavy an async web-oriented stack (ie. NodeJS) makes sense, and then TS is an obvious improvement over raw JS, and if the frontend is also JS/TS then at least there's some chance that expertise can be shared

This soundbite really needs to go away. It and its counterexamples don't apply in any significant measure. You can pay and still be the product, and that is often the case.

Open Source != Free, feels like the typical HN user should know this better than the average user.

FWIW, the people working on this project has Mission and Vision pages on their website: https://linagora.com/en/mission https://linagora.com/en/vision

Took me a whooping 17 seconds to find those two.

I’m not sure, but if major companies start using it, they’ll definitely find a way to make money from it.

Damn bro, I didn’t know gcc had been exploiting me for all these years.