Happy New Year everyone! I’m kicking it off with a change from SparkleShare to Seafile for my private, self-hosted cloud storage. I have a server (Ubuntu 12.04) in my room that’s been running a SparkleShare cloud for about five months. It was my first time setting up anything of the like, so I’ve stuck with it through the annoying bugs. It does have many awesome features and has been super convenient, but I can’t get over the fact that it will never work with Git repositories. Admittedly I didn’t look that hard, but I thought the only other option for private cloud hosting was CloudShare.

Anyway, I was at Barnes & Noble yesterday and saw mention of Seafile in one of the many Ubuntu/Linux magazines on display. I’d never heard the name, so of course I looked it up and started reading. It was immediately apparent that the level of polish on Seafile is outstanding. It has no problem with Git repos and syncs extremely fast. It hosts a web server called Seahub so users can collaborate on and discuss files. To top it all off, the documentation is excellent, which makes installation a breeze. The installation and setup only took a few hours last night, including transferring my files from the old system and creating all of my libraries. It’s even running on an extra domain I have so I don’t need to use my IP or a freeDNS URL.

The docs alone on Seafile were almost enough to convince me it was worth changing over. Still, I’m glad I found Pat’s articles on Patshead.com about his experience with the software. They really helped answer the remaining questions I had. My time with Seafile so far may be slim, but I’m already so glad I went for it. Everything about it has been awesome and I’m very excited to have a new cloud!

Hope you all have a wonderful start to 2014!!