Dropbear

Personal Dropbox, More Cuddly

Dropbear keeps a local folder in sync with an S3-compatible bucket. One CLI binary + Bring Your Own Bucket (BYOB) — Cloudflare R2, MinIO, Backblaze B2, AWS S3, whatever speaks the protocol.

If you came here wondering what this thing is and whether it's worth your time, start here:

• Why does this exist? — the elevator pitch, and what Dropbear is not
• Use cases — the modes a root can run as
• Who is this for? — the assumed user
• Setup — rough sketch of how to get a root running (pre-1.0; expect this to change)
• Trade-offs — what got picked, what got given up, and why
• Failure modes — what breaks, what it looks like, what you do
• Gaps & known issues — what isn't done yet, and what's deliberately out of scope
• Storage read contract — the bucket layout as a versioned contract for independent (non-Go) readers

At a Glance

$ dropbear register --root-id photos --device-id laptop --mode bidirectional \
    --remote-bucket my-bucket --remote-endpoint https://abc.r2.cloudflarestorage.com \
    ~/Pictures
$ dropbear sync ~/Pictures
synced ↓0 (0 bytes) ↑42 (18394821 bytes) ⊘0 ✗0 ⚠0 → 20260526T142301Z_a1b2c3d4

On a second machine, init the same root_id with a different device_id, run restore --from laptop, and the two devices converge on sync.

Status

Pre-1.0. v0.2 shipped bidirectional sync, conflict files, explicit tombstones, and sync modes. v0.3 added daemon mode, the filesystem watcher, a local status API, and an embedded web dashboard. Since then: materialized views (shelve/fetch on-demand downloads) and a macOS desktop tray. v0.4 promotes the read-only status API into a small local control plane so the dashboard and tray can drive sync directly. v1.0 is when the bootstrap story stops being rough — see Gaps & Known Issues for what's still missing.