"Bitpocket as a Dropbox alternative"

As an excuse for trying out Posterous email posting and its Autopost feature (in this case to Twitter and Identi.ca) I'll present you Bitpocket.

In short, Bitpocket is a small but smart bash script that does two-way directory synchronization resembling Dropbox sync. Simply it just uses rsync to make the actual sync. It runs rsync twice: first syncing from remote to local machine, then from local to remote machine. This way all new files that appeared on remote are fetched to local machine and all new locally created files are replicated on remote machine.

But additionally it makes sure that file deletion is properly propagated in this 2-way synchronization, which isn't possible by just running rsync twice. The problem is rsync deletes all new created files or brings back the files you deleted depending on which direction we sync in first (and when using --delete option). Bitpocket solves that by tracking names of created and deleted files between its invocations and using these lists as a source for --exclude-from rsync option when doing first, remote -> local sync.

To make sure Bitpocket behaves like I wanted it to behave I've spec'ed it. Yes, it's a bash script, not a ruby code, but who said I can't use rspec to test a bash script?

For details about usage see Bitpocket's README. I'm using it instead of Dropbox for few weeks now and it does quite good job. Give it a try.