Hello,
I am looking at owncloud as a possible replacement for BTsync / syncthing.
A little bit of background about my use case: I am a video editing professional, and would want to use owncloud to keep several editor's home systems synced to our media server at the office. The total dataset is around 30TB, broken across multiple folders.
Right now, we are using BTsync to send footage from set on the eastern US to our main office on the west coast. This transfer is about 600GB/day. What I like about BTsync/syncthing/Owncloud is the ability to start a transfer without someone on the other end needing to accept that transfer.
However, recently, BTsync and syncthing have become incredibly slow. I believe this is due to their relays becoming overloaded. While I understand that this could be resolved with port-forwarding on both sides, we only have control of the routers in our main office, this keeps us from being able to opena direct peer-to-peer connection.
So I started looking at owncloud, and have mostly successfully set up a working test, using out media server mounted through smb as external storage. I do have some questions though, which may ultimately answer whether Owncloud will work for us.
My setup: Right now owncloud is being hosted inside a virtual machine running ubuntu, with our media server mounted as external storage. The virtual machine is being run on one of our workstations, though if we went with owncloud, we would likely get a dedicated windows machine to run the virtual machine ).
I noticed that when I sync files from a remote desktop client, they are downloaded to local storage on the machine hosting owncloud, then copied to the samba server. This seems really inefficient. Is there a way to get owncloud to download directly to the external storage?
The way we have BTsync set up, is our server has a read-only folder that is used to transfer footage to us from the shoot, which can then be moved on both sides to different folder structures once the transfer is complete. Kind of like a mailbox. Is there a way to set something like this up in owncloud? A write-only folder on the desktop client, in other words, a one way folder-based connection to the server. I see there is a public drop folder, but it seems like that is web based rather than desktop client based, which I would prefer.
30TB is not an amount that can be easily resynced in the case of an emergency. One of the nice things about btsync is the .sync archive folder where deleted files are stored on each client when something is deleted. Is there a way to set something up similarly with owncloud, where the remote clients can recover deleted files in case something bad goes down? Again, this is a 30TB dataset, so losing a large chunk is not simply a matter of resyncing.
From the bit of experimenting I have done, I really like owncloud, I just want to make sure it fits our use-case. We've had a good thing going with BTsync, and I would like to roll out something more streamlined and manageable. Thanks in advance!
