Self hosted Dropbox alternative - a Seafile setup overview

[king1]

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:

• 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
   

[enserf]

[quote pid="54527" dateline="1710285970"]
  
[/quote]
Well done! I would have tried that once upon a time; these days I'm too lazy.

I use GoodSync to backup local folders (with files as-is; not come proprietary compressed format) to a) my external hard drive (primary backup) and b) OneDrive (secondary backup).
Yes, OneDrive costs but it comes with my Office 365 subscription which I use. I get 1TB per user included which is pretty good.

[king1]

[quote pid="54527" dateline="1710285970"]
  

Well done! I would have tried that once upon a time; these days I'm too lazy.

I use GoodSync to backup local folders (with files as-is; not come proprietary compressed format) to a) my external hard drive (primary backup) and b) OneDrive (secondary backup).
Yes, OneDrive costs but it comes with my Office 365 subscription which I use. I get 1TB per user included which is pretty good.
[/quote]

another one I have been thinking about and experimenting with is RCLONE which you can use for pooling cloud storage into one large drive.  So for example with the Office 365 Family which is 6 users, you could setup each user account then pool the accounts into a single 6TB cloud drive.

You can achieve the same with stablebit which has a GUI but that costs, RCLONE is cli only I believe...

[nzoomed]

Sounds a good alternative indeed.
I remember that Western Digital had something called "mycloud" on their NAS drives.
I guess the big thing with this will be the requirement to use DDNS if you dont have a static IP address, how about connections over CG-NAT?

[king1]

Sounds a good alternative indeed.
I remember that Western Digital had something called "mycloud" on their NAS drives.
I guess the big thing with this will be the requirement to use DDNS if you dont have a static IP address, how about connections over CG-NAT?

Not sure about that, I imagine clients would be ok on CG-NAT, but I can't imagine the server would cope with it.  In fact that must be the case for the client apps as my camera upload works when i'm out and about, the mobile networks are cgnat iirc

[nzoomed]

CG-NAT is a real PITA, im finding, I have found some workarounds for cameras using zerotier and VPN's but its reportedly poorer performance when running over GC-NAT.
4G and Starlink all use it too, but at least on my fibre connection I have a static IP so should be easy to implement for me, but some cheaper ISPs use CG-NAT on fibre too.