Own Your Data with OwnCloud

Shawn Powers — Mon, 07 Oct 2013 21:03:17 +0000

I love Dropbox. I really do. With a Google AdWords campaign, and $50 or so, I was able to max out my free storage. That means I have around 24GB of free Dropbox storage to fiddle with. Granted, that's a lot, but in the grand scheme of things, 24GB isn't very much space. During the past few years, I've mentioned several alternatives (like SparkleShare), but the new kid on the block, OwnCloud, is a Web-based application that provides a plethora of cloud-based services. The most popular is its file syncing.

Setting up OwnCloud isn't for the faint of heart, as it requires some PHP tweaking and really should be SSL-encrypted, but for anyone comfortable with configuring LAMP applications, it's not insurmountable. Once your server is installed, there are native syncing applications for Windows, OS X, Linux, Android and iOS. Because OwnCloud is hosted on your own server, your space limitation is based on your actual hard drive space!

If you've ever wished your Dropbox data was hosted on your own servers, or if you just don't have enough space, check out OwnCloud. It not only supplies file syncing, but with its extendible infrastructure, it also can do calendaring, sharing and pretty much anything else you'd want to do with cloud computing. Check it out today at http://www.owncloud.org.

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