Migrating to ownCloud

Productivity Sauce

I've been meaning to move from Wuala to ownCloud for some time, but there were always more important things on my to-do list. Recently, though, Wuala started to act up, so it was time to take the plunge. What can I say? I wish I moved to ownCloud earlier. Deploying the application on my virtual private server took about 15 minutes. I chose the manual installation procedure, but there is also a web-based installer which does the donkey job of installing ownCloud for you.

ownCloud requires practically no configuration. I disabled a few default apps I wasn't planning on using, and that was it. To enable the file synchronization functionality, I installed the ownCloud desktop client on my machines. The ownCloud project offers binary packages for all popular Linux distributions, including all Ubuntu flavors, so installing the client was a matter of adding a repository to the sources.list file and running the apt-get update && apt-get install owncloud-client command. Configuring the client wasn't particularly difficult either. I provided connection info, specified the directories I wanted to keep in sync, and the client took it from there. So far, it works like a charm. Since ownCloud features a built-in text editor, I can access synced files and edit them in a browser.

The ownCloud project also offers an Android app which can be used to access files and documents from an Android device. The clever part is that you can grab a file and keep it in sync by enabling the Keep file up to date option. The app also includes the instant upload functionality, which automatically uploads photos taken with the Android device to ownCloud.