John's Blog

It works.

Installation was fairly simple. I took notes so I’ll have something to refer to if I ever need to install it again.

I installed the client on my mobile. Added a file to the server, showed up almost instantly on the phone. Same thing vice versa. It’s quick.

So I have my own cloud service. No more dropbox, one drive, etc. I’ll talk with Kim and Kyle about using it to toss files back and forth for the laser printers. I’ll use it for getting camera pictures from the phone to my workstation, and moving documents and images from workstation to server. That way I won’t need to use a dongle or deal with bluetooth (which only works when the two devices are within range). Just drop the file here and presto, it’s over there.

While reading the Seafile documents I came across the paragraph in the picture. ping and pong. Cute.

There’s a few things left to do. I need to encrypt the data as it moves through the internet between devices. I’ll use a SSL cert for that. I have no need for end-to-end encryption. Annnnd, there’s a way to set up my phone so that every picture I take is automagically sent to the server with no manual syncing. I definitely want to get that figured out.

Some Seafile users have negatively commented that they don’t like Seafile because it breaks each file into chunks. During sync it only updates the chunks that are different, making sync faster. They’d rather the files were stored in their native form because they’re concerned about backing up their stuff.

The solution to that is to back up the entire server including Seafile, and the MySQL database that goes with. I haven’t given it much thought. My use case isn’t critical like a business or corporation.

So at this point I’m satisfied with Seafile. I’m not saying I’ll keep using it or that I won’t switch to something else, just so far so good. Cheers.