SparkleShare, a Dropbox alternative

I’ve been looking for an alternative to DropBox for a while now, preferably one that’s open source and that I can run on my own server. I’ve come across bash scripts that use rsync, but they just never resonated with me. I gave up looking but recently came across SparkleShare. With clients for Linux, Windows and Android, I had to give this a try.

Setting up the server on my VPS and installing the Linux client went pretty smoothly, and things work as advertised. Getting the Windows client working was more hairy. It worked if I accepted the default settings, but I wanted to have the data directory on a different drive than the application and that didn’t work. This didn’t put me off though. Their Windows client is still in its infancy and I’ve been wanting to find an open-source project to really dive into. SparkleShare may be it. It’s something I want to use, and I recently got an Android phone I’ve been writing apps for; I’ll try the SparkleShare Android app next. But for now, I made a code change to SparkleShare to allow the data directory to be on a different drive than the application.