Hacker News Reader

Comment by Feld0 | Hacker News Reader

I highly recommend Seafile for this purpose. It was far more performant and reliable than ownCloud when I tried it, and more self-contained.

View on HN

100% agree. Running Seafile for ~1.5 years with >100GB synced and ~5 users. Couldn't be happier. The sync-part just works.

Big advantages over own/nextcloud:

* Easy updates that work. When I tried owncloud, nearly every update I had to fiddle around with the database to make it work. Didn't have a single problem when updating Seafile so far.

* Block-level sync. Meaning if you change one line in a 10MB file, it will only update that part. Last time I checked, owncloud did not support this.

* Sync just works. When I tried owncloud, folders disappeared, folders were duplicated. Never had this problem with Seafile.

I installed Seafile and ran it for a while, but what I didn't like is that in order to get to the file on the server, I had to use fuse and, well, I just didn't want to have to do that. Picky, I get it, but we all have preferences.

I've run ownCloud for some time now and I don't see the reliability issues that some people claim. I am running it on TS140 and not something small like a RPi, so maybe that makes the difference.

I've run ownCloud for about half a year to sync my dev files to a hosted server. For a while, everything was great. What happened for me at least was if I was saving a project while ownCloud was syncing, there was a chance of it messing up and then requiring a full resync of my dev folder (a not insignificant amount of data).

The first time it happened I shrugged it off as a fluke. The second time I became gunshy and would disable it any time I was working, then enable it after. Not a big inconvenience but a hassle and something I had to remember. After a while I stopped using it. YMMV, of course.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com