[dba-Tech] Replace your Dropbox

[Jim Lawrence]

Hi All:

I find Dropbox to be a very useful tool. 

If you only use small amounts of data as a single user its cheap/free but the moment it becomes used in a business environment the cost per user can quickly adds up. 

https://www.dropbox.com/business/buy#0

One of the concerns is not necessarily the price but that the data is not encrypted so some employee or some middle-man attack could take all the information. If you have any concerns about possible government collections of private information, Dropbox is not your best choice. That said there now is a OSS solution.

Germany has turned out yet another incredible application. It claims to be used by over 400,000 people so it is a rock solid product. It is called Seafile:

https://www.seafile.com/

The beauty of this application is that you or your company can host it themselves, the amount of data that can be stored is limited the amount of drives you allocate to it. It features are file syncing, runs on line or off, built-in state of the art encryption, of course, great performance and easy upgrades. This program is fully enterprize ready.

There are clients for virtually every type of system; Cloud based, Android, Windows, iOS and Linux.

Note: If you are hosting this application, the server can only be Linux. If you are unfamiliar with Linux there is a company that claims to be able to remote into your site, assuming that you have the appropriate hardware and fully install the package in less that two hours. Noah J. Chelliah‏ owns a highly successful, only Linux solution company called Altispeed, centred in Grand Forks, ND: 

http://www.altispeed.com/:
http://www.asknoahshow.com/

If you what a fully hosted solution, Seafile does provide a secure private server hosting with appropriate support and pricing. It will still be a substantial saving from a Dropbox type solution:

https://www.seafile.com/en/product/private_server/

If you decide to go the personal hosting and installing route there are extensive instructions on how to do this on a number of Linux distro. When I install mine it will on a Debian - Ubuntu distro. Installation instruction are as follows...relatively simple:

https://www.howtoforge.com/tutorial/seafile-on-ubuntu-with-nginx/
http://bit.ly/2sjWaV3

Aside: I will be away for three weeks so my install will have to wait until then.

Jim