[eropple]

> cloud files almost directly equivalent to Dropbox

And when your electronics get trashed by water damage or the stray lightning strike? Cloud computing involves redundancy and fault tolerance and a box in your closet is neither. That goes particularly for "almost directly equivalent to Dropbox"; even setting aside sharing, "not having everything go up in smoke because my house burns down" is kind of a killer-app feature.

You can, of course, build a "private cloud". (I've done it for clients before!) But it will cost you.

[benologist]

It can also automatically sync whatever you want to any of dozens of archiving services... encrypted or not. Including Amazon Cloud Drive boasting unlimited space for $60/year, BackBlaze B2, S3, Glacier, Dropbox, Google Drive etc.

It can keep a redundant NAS in sync too but not sure how seamless that would be in practice if you wanted redundancy for the software running on it.

However what really makes me optimistic about this stuff is the aligned interests:

- a great software experience for their hardware leveraging open source solutions (I think it's brtfs for the versioning/restoring, transmission for torrents etc)

vs

- Dropbox selling a blob of space for $10/month and trying to solve the "problem" of you not paying more by lying in their advertisements