13-03-2024, 11:26 AM
Thought I might share my experiences setting up a Seafile server, a reasonably complete, self hosted, dropbox clone...
https://www.seafile.com/en/home/
I was looking for an alternative to avoid subscriptions, somewhere to store 100GB of photos and to manage the camera uploads from two or three phones.
The Basics:
The setup process took me a couple of days off and on working through the process, I've used Ubuntu before so had a bit of an idea what I was doing but had a few annoying problems along the way, specifically...
The only complaint I really have about it is it keeps the data in the data folder in a block-format using compression to reduce file size. I would prefer if files were left alone, but I mitigate that buy running a seperate sync client on another PC that sync all libraries locally...
and the drive client doesn't mount to a drive letter but I have worked out ho to do that now - dropbox doesn't either
The Flexibility is great, if an account gets low on space, just allocate more, it's private, no subs, what's not to like...
Some screenshots...
The Sync Client
[attachment=683]
The Drive Client
[attachment=682]
The User Web Interface
[attachment=681]
The Admin Web Interface
[attachment=680]
https://www.seafile.com/en/home/
I was looking for an alternative to avoid subscriptions, somewhere to store 100GB of photos and to manage the camera uploads from two or three phones.
The Basics:
- It is self hosted, you run it on your own hardware or VPS...
- It has a feature rich open source community edition
- GUIs are very similar to dropbox, there a file sync client that can sync some or all libraries, there is also a drive client that sets up in file explorer which uses a 10GB cache but doesn't sync the actual files
- Allows external link sharing, passwords, timelimits etc
- There is a docker version ready to go but that was incompatible with my existing virtualbox VMs
- Server only runs on linux (I set it up a virtualbox VM Ubuntu client from scratch for it) - client apps for Windows, Mac, Android, IOS
The setup process took me a couple of days off and on working through the process, I've used Ubuntu before so had a bit of an idea what I was doing but had a few annoying problems along the way, specifically...
- Mysql DB vs MariaDB, chose MYSQL initially but had issues, Maria worked fine...
- folder permissions
- Prerequisite versions
- Symlink/mount for a windows network share for the Data Folder on the host PC via FSTAB
- Some config issues setting up the reverse proxy and security certificates
- Ubuntu logging out and closing the network share mount caused me a few headaches until I figured out what is was up to...
- Getting the Seafile services to startup on boot with systemd
- planning for backups
The only complaint I really have about it is it keeps the data in the data folder in a block-format using compression to reduce file size. I would prefer if files were left alone, but I mitigate that buy running a seperate sync client on another PC that sync all libraries locally...
and the drive client doesn't mount to a drive letter but I have worked out ho to do that now - dropbox doesn't either
The Flexibility is great, if an account gets low on space, just allocate more, it's private, no subs, what's not to like...
Some screenshots...
The Sync Client
[attachment=683]
The Drive Client
[attachment=682]
The User Web Interface
[attachment=681]
The Admin Web Interface
[attachment=680]