Unix and Linux → Re: dropbox version for myself?

thanks salty!

I have employee information being stored. I want to sync it as they are located across the USA and I need to access it from different devices when assigning them work.

This will be done on iMac, iPad, iPhone, android, and I am going to make my own desktop build (either amd or intel barebones build running debian), but this one will be in near future.

I am using dropbox now, and it works great, however, I don't feel it may be as secure as I want it to be.

The most secure way to do this would be for the clients to connect to the server (I assume it is some where) using SSH or SFTP. SSH includes the ability to do file transfer.

That is a little more involved, and cross platform use can be limited (some devices have to be rooted (read: phones/tablets) to use SSH/SFTP).

For a little less of a headache, you can try using Bittorrent Sync. I hear/have read good things about it. Supposedly, it generates a key for each folder shared that the client has to have in order to sync with what ever is running the Bittorrent Sync server (such as a linux box). Here is a tutorial to set it up on Debian.. After that, all you need is a Bittorrent Client (for IOS, your options are limited to Bittorrent's own clients, such as utorrent or their web browser version).

I'm with Tirael, a keypair based SSHFS session would be good, but sounds like you'd rather use something more Browser-centric like OwnCloud.

My recommendations:

Use OwnCloud, with a securely configured PHP instance (such as allow_url_fopen = false, disabling pass_thru, exec, system, etc). Configure the TCP 80 Apache2 listener to HTTP 301 to TCP 443 where you have a CA configured and you've issued client certificates to your devices. Configure Apache to do chrooting. Consider GPG/PGPing the data so it's secure at rest.