Anyone tried OwnCloud?

[Feathers McGraw]

For some reason I missed that anyone had replied to this

Anyway, thanks for your replies good to know that people here are using it, I was intrigued as soon as I discovered ownCloud but it took a while for me to take the plunge and set it up.

I've got ownCloud up and running, and configured the way I'd like it (with the help of steve's post on the ownCloud forum!). It was actually relatively easy compared to some other things I've tried, which is encouraging.

So far, it seems very good. Bear in mind I'm running it on a raspberry pi (not the one that's running my website & mail server, I thought that would be asking a bit much).

I've found the web interface a little slow to load (compared to wordpress, citadel mail server on the same hardware), but not prohibitively so.

Both the desktop client (installed directly from ownCloud, not the repos - thanks Steve) and mobile client seem much faster, I can only assume that the web interface is the slow bit, and not what's under the bonnet.

I'm surprised that the mobile app has such poor ratings on the play store, it works very well on my Nexus 7 with CM 10.1.3 (~Android 4.2.2). The app is free from F-droid, about 65p from Google Play - unfortunately, you can't give it a good review unless you buy it from the play store, so perhaps that's why!

It has a feature that lets you automatically upload any photos you take. You can specify whether or not you want this done on wifi only. I think this will be a hit with my girlfriend, who used the equivalent feature on DropBox for a while but quickly ran out of space! Now we can put those old hard drives to good use instead of worrying about the 5GB limit on DropBox.

Feathers

[kubicle]

I use owncloud regularly, and it meets my needs. It isn't perfect for every use case, but it's actively developed, quite versatile, fairly quick and easy to set up and in your own control.

In versions 3.x and 4.x, the sync mechanism was terrible. Rather than relying on something like inotify to inform the sync client of changes, the client was checking the server every 30 seconds. I cannot abide such a waste of network resources. I've read that the sync mechanism was redesigned; perhaps this flaw has been fixed.

I think the main problem in using inotify would be that it does not do recursion and won't detect changes on the server. The sync client has seen some optimizations already (although I actually do not use the sync clients):

Another, still ongoing effort is the introduction of a smarter scheduler that ensures that sync runs will only be performed whenever there are changes on the server. Before, we could only detect local changes. In order to achieve this, we leverage the E-Tag, a Unique ID provided by the ownCloud WebDAV server. This should result in significantly reduced CPU load and networking traffic. No more sync runs every 30 seconds. Instead, the root E-Tags on the server are being checked, and a sync run is only started if they changed. Also, we have lowered the thread priority for the actual sync run to provide a smoother experience.

(https://daniel.molkentin.net/2013/08...-visual-guide/)

[SteveRiley]

It's a ginormous pile of PHP that most of the time works pretty well. Development is rapid, they're squashing a lot of bugs and adding features, but I sometimes worry that it's just too big. However, if you need even a small subset of what it offers, it's the absolute fastest way to get into production.

In versions 3.x and 4.x, the sync mechanism was terrible. Rather than relying on something like inotify to inform the sync client of changes, the client was checking the server every 30 seconds. I cannot abide such a waste of network resources. I've read that the sync mechanism was redesigned; perhaps this flaw has been fixed.

Don't use the version in the repos, it's always behind. Get the latest from http://www.owncloud.org.

[Feathers McGraw]

I've been considering setting up my own dropbox-like storage with OwnCloud.

From what I can tell, the features of the two are very similar.

If you've used it, how did it perform (and under what conditions, connection speed etc.) ?

I noticed that the desktop client is in the Ubuntu repos, is it any good? How about the Android app?

Feathers