Owncloud: file synchronization: Introduction

OwnCloud is an application that gives users file synchronization of almost any device over the shared file server. It works just as any other synchronization software (Dropbox, Google Drive, etc).

OwnCloud has some additional points, appart from the ones offered by the other programs:

• Security: all data is on shared files server, so no one external to the UPF has physical access to your data.
• Backup: ownCloud is integrated with the shared files server backup policies.  
• Same user: you don’t need to create another user. OwnCloud works with your usual research username and password.  
• Quota: Each user has 100 GB of storage.
• Additionally, you can connect the UPF’s ownCloud service to any other external synchronization space you may use. Currently, ownCloud supports connections from DropBox, Google Drive, Amazon S3, FTPs, Swift and external WebDAV servers. 

We can revert the version of the files from the server to any of the saved states of the file. This operation will establish the current version of the file on every device who is synchronized to this dataset.

For example: if you have your tablet, your laptop and your Android mobile synchronized on this directory and you select to revert a file to a given version, this file will be replaced on all your devices. This cannot be undone, so use this method with caution.

Since 2014 the University has corporate Google Apps service, so Google Drive is accessible to any corporative user. Owncloud advantage over Google Drive is privacy: using the ownCloud server we can guarantee the data is not visible to people outside the files. However, efficiency and storage of the server are not as good as the ones from the Google apps.