I configured Dropbox in the last blog, which I use to send scanner output from my WF-3640. I also use it to sync a number of services between iOS and macOS devices (1Password, YNAB, MacDive, and Mindset to name but a few) but other than that I don’t really use DropBox for data anymore.
For me, and I suspect many others, Dropbox was probably one of the first ‘cloud’ services I used regularly. I guess I was a bit of a ‘Dropbox Evangelist’ when it first became popular, mainly as it made sharing files so simple, but also because for every friend you recommended they gave you an extra 250MB of free storage! I can’t remember exactly what you got free, to begin with, but over time I managed to increase my limit to 9.25GB. But once I’d realised how useful this was for keeping things in sync across multiple devices, whilst being able to share and/or access from any device, it really wasn’t enough. I know you can get almost an unlimited amount now for a whole range of different providers, and I’ve probably got basic accounts with many of them (Google Drive, Amazon Cloud, Microsoft Onedrive, Box, etc.) but back then it wasn’t particularly cheap to get more storage, and at the time I think I preferred the idea of keeping my data (especially the important stuff) on my hardware.
This led me to ownCloud which I’ve been using since v5.x around about 2013. At first it was running on OSX, and I used my iMac as the server, but it’s now running v9.1.1 in a jail on freenas1 and whilst I could probably live without it, it’s incredibly useful and means in theory I have access to around 24TB of cloud storage (reality is I probably use less than 1TB as I don’t share any media content through ownCloud)
During my network configuration, I actually created a mount point to a full backup of my ownCloud configuration and data, but that won’t let me create something in eOS and for that to automatically update on my other devices, so I needed to install the ownCloud client. I was fully expecting there to be a Linux version and even found it in the AppCenter, so installing was a breeze.
I did have some problems connecting to my ownCloud server until I realised I needed an app-specific password as I’m using 2FA, doh!
Once I’d created that everything worked fine, and I configured a number of folders to sync. I didn’t see the need for everything, and wouldn’t have had space on my EXT4 partition anyway.
The first sync always takes a little time, but after it completed ownCloud is happily running away in the background with eOS sending me little notifications anytime something is added to another device.
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