When dropbox isn't enough

Basically, its status won't always be green. This past week, their service going down without notice, due to server maintenance, screwed big time on a critical time of a project I was participating. Granted, it's not like it was their fault, they even state on the brand new TOS that Dropbox is Available “AS-IS”. But it did teach me the lesson to never ever rely on them. Something I should have learned without needing to experience such failure - or had been better prepared - I know.

Still, Dropbox is great and I advise everyone to have at least a free account there (with referral +250mb!)

For this purpose, I searched for alternatives and fallback possibilities. Some promise to be better, but none seem to have it all I wanted, which is basically the dropbox opensourced and gitable. SparkleShare was the closest to that, but it's too fragile the way it is right now, without any steady income seems like. Anyway, here were my final candidates:

- SpiderOak (referral gives +1gb) this is the best replacement promise. Simply looks awesome.

- SugarSync (referral) I even had an account there already, and it's the most popular alternative. Gotta try it.

- Tonido I may even buy the plug when I get the time to handle all the importation (it took me almost 6 months just to buy me a fonera, after 2 years waiting in vain for a brazilian launch), but it also seems to not offer any sync so it's my last resort.

I'm not sure yet if I'm going to choose one or try them all together and see which one survives better. I already use crashplan (rather than carbonite) and time machine for backups, so I'm not too worried about that.

And then, I wanted also a 3rd fallback place for projects. Of course I should have that always ready and, the funny thing is, this was the first chain of projects in the past 12 months that I've used no Version Control whatsoever (except for dropbox'es), and the last one was the first one that gave me issues - not on versioning but on syncing (or lack of). So I went ahead and also researched for that. I considered using mercurial, but gave up because GIT is just the way to go from now until the next VCS paradigm (first there was CVS, then SVN, now it's GIT).

Problem is, there is no good free private git repository I could find, except maybe for codebase. So I'm considering using it along with bitbucket. And, for whenever project I can leave it on open, I push it also to either google code or github - the two major and thus more reliable ones. And I'll always have them all git'ed in my machine first and foremost, with a good-yet-to-be-found git client, which probably will be SmartGIT + Terminal.

Here, I'm simply documenting all those findings for my own further reference. And I shall update this post once I've tested a few of them.