iFolder - an OpenSource & Free Dropbox Alternative

Wednesday, June 9, 2010 at 9:22 AM

I've loved using Dropbox. It's small, quick, and unintrusive. You install it and it does its thing in the background, without any user interaction. Dropbox has released iPhone/iPad and Android clients, and the "public" sharing option is excellent. I'm currently using Dropbox to synchronize some documents, things I need to read from my iPhone, small files I wish to share with friends/co-workers, Filezillla sitemanager.xml files, etc.

My only complaint is that there's not more space available for free. :) Their plans are rather reasonable ($99/yr for 50GB)... just a little too rich for what I would expect for that type of service.

I've been looking at different file synchronization programs, but nothing has jumped out as the perfect solution, until now.

iFolder is an open-source project originally created by Novell and still available as part of their Open Enterprise Server product. It has quite a few similarities with Dropbox, with the added benefit of being able to run my own server at home, provide as much disk space as I wanted, and get the LAN-based synchronization solution I was looking for.

I currently have a virtual machine image of a SuSe Linux server running the iFolder service and have synchronization with virtually unlimited space (only limited to the size & number of drives I throw in the iFolder server).

My next post will be more of a "how-to" which will walk you through downloading, configuring, and using iFolder... The information's out there on the Internet, but nothing in an "all in one page" that I've found so far.

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