My Own Cloud, My Own Gnome Files!

Recently a discussion in Gnome Mailing Lists took place about sync Files with OwnCloud. That might isn’t interesting to the most of us -besides who will abandon Google Drive, Ubuntu One, DropBox for a personal cloud storage service?

As I have set up lots of OwnCloud instances for companies that I work for, the answer is simple. Companies are way too interested for this, because OwnCloud offers the ultimate Open Source solution for storing and managing files. 

OwnCloud

I am not going to review OwnCloud, and there is a good explanation. There is a live demo to try it on their webesite. Just go to owncloud.org and press “try it”!

Installation is super easy, and it doesn’t differ from a Joomla install. Just move the Owncloud files on our webserver directory, -change permissions depending your hosting-, setup a mysql database, visit the owncloud location and follow the instructions.  Actually is easier than Joomla to set it up :)

Benefits

You have total control of your data plus you can easily expand it! The bad news is in order to run it for production (online), you will need a descent hosting and that means a high cost. However OwnCloud is a good solution for private networks as well and this is how I run it in the following example.

My Dummy Example

I set up an OwnCloud in a Virtual Ubuntu 12.04 Server which I run a Samba Server and I share the Data folder of the OwnCloud. So when I upload files via the OwnCloud I can see them in my Files Window and vice versa (without really a sync in that case).

This is obviously a not real life example and is a totally stupid way of doing things. On the other hand is a nice showcase how things will be in case that Gnome implements OwnCloud support in Files and also is a simple way to start playing with networks and virtualization.

If you are interested to try it, check how I set up the Samba Server, but in here I used “root” as user to skip the permissions configurations inside Apache Folder.

By the way sync OwnCloud and Files is nothing more than a discussion in Marketing List, but if you interested to learn more, just follow it :)