I run DropBox, OneDrive, Copy, Google Drive and Cubby on my machine. I guess I am a sucker for cloud storage.
I use DropBox to store my SVN plugin archives. I use OneDrive to store my stories and fiction works in progress. I use Google drive for documents and to host a few static sites. I forgot that I even had Copy. It has a backup (from last April) of my websites.
My favorite was Cubby because it allowed me to sync folders located all around my disk. I synced the folders that I use for Stop Spammer work. Recently, though Cubby stopped syncing. I found that it was storing deleted files and versions of old files and it blew through the 6 gigs that I had. Clearing out the old stuff got me back to 4 gig free. The failure, however, was silent and I went a few days cursing the fact that I lost changes. I thought Cubby was having errors or else the software was not working at all.
This week I installed OwnCloud.org on a subdomain on my hosting service. It was an item in “Softaculous”. The installation was entering the subdomain name and clicking OK. I then installed the desktop client and after a few false starts was able to backup my stop spammers development folders. It is now installed at my day job, here in my home office machine and my laptop. If I edit a file in one place, it shows up on the other machines automatically so I don’t have to keep track of changes. I like it.
OwnCloud is slower than the other services because it runs under PHP on my host server. It uses resources on the host server where I am limited by the number of PHP hits that I am allowed each month. I will have to keep my eye on it. I want to control the frequency of its server checks and maybe not check at all during the night. I will investigate this.
Now, what I would really like, is the ability to configure OwnCloud so that I can sync the www_root folder on my servers and then when I make a change here it will instantly appear on the website. This sounds like a good way to break a website, but it is also a simple way to update static sites.
I will check to see if anyone has a OwnCloud plugin for WordPress that does this for the dynamic sites. I thought about it and it seems very complicated. Perhaps I could write something to sync settings, users and posts as well as physical files.
Thank you, I’ll check it out.
Keith
Have you seen GoodSync? You can configure profiles within it to sync automatically between as many destinations as you like — local, network, cloud — whatever. It’s pretty cool. It’s not free, but it appears to be more extensive than OwnCloud.