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
The Drive Client
The User Web Interface
The Admin Web Interface
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
The Drive Client
The User Web Interface
The Admin Web Interface
This world would be a perfect place if it wasn't for the people.
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