After the notorious Megaupload was disbanded its founder, Kim Dotcom, founded MEGA. MEGA is a cloud hosting site which offers users a whopping 50GB of space for free. They’ve always said there’d be a Linux client, and now there is.
Heading over to https://mega.co.nz/#sync you’ll be greeted with a choice of several Linux distros (both 32 and 64-bit) and a download button.
For Ubuntu (and variants) you’ll download a DEB file which you can double click to install as normal. You’ll need to sign up for a free account on the site too. You’ll use these login details when installing MEGA. During the install you’ll also get to choose where to put your main MEGAsync directory (in /home/username by default) and if there are any other directories you want to keep sync’d to the cloud.
Once it’s installed you’ll see, in your taskbar, a red circle with a white M in it. Clicking that gives you some basic stats on your MEGA account.
Assuming you did a default install then you’ll also see a new folder in your home directory, it’s called MEGAsync.
Anything you put/save in this folder will automatically be uploaded to your MEGA cloud space. This folder acts just like Dropbox currently does. And, like Dropbox, you can access your files via the web interface.
In the web interface, you can upload/download files and the MEGAsync folder will update accordingly. You can also use their Chrome/Firefox plugins, or their mobile apps, to access your space.
Credit where it’s due. Dotcom and his crew have certainly put a lot of work into this. There aren’t many other hosting sites offering 50GB for free (with, of course, upgrade options), mobile/browser apps, a slick interface, and a pretty damn secure hosting service. Dotcom has regularly paid out bounty awards for people spotting bugs/vulnerabilities (https://mega.co.nz/#blog_19).
My only criticism of MEGA is the lack of a timed update. My Internet upload speed is pretty dire, so I’d prefer my folder(s) to sync at 4am when I’m sleeping. I’m hoping that’ll be a feature in a future update.
So, this just leaves you, Google, to give us a Linux client for Google Drive. Hello? Are you listening?