Owncloud-Client

it could already be read somewhere that 2021 will be the year of Linux on the desktop :-D Fine with me. Just to support that, I did a little hackery over XMas to improve the support for ownClouds virtual file system on the Linux Desktop. What are Virtual Files? In professional usecases, users often have a huge amount of data stored in ownCloud. Syncing these completely to the desktop computer or laptop would be too much and costly in bandwidth and harddisk space. That is why most mature file sync solutions came up with the concept of virtual files. That means that users have the full structure with directories and files mirrored to their local machines, but have placeholder of the real files in the local file manager. The files, however, are not on the disk. They get downloaded on demand. ...

A couple of weeks ago we released another significant milestone of the ownCloud Client, called version 2.2.0, followed by two small maintenance releases. (download). I’d like to highlight some of the new features and the changes that we have made to improve the user experience: Overlay Icons Overlay icons for the various file managers on our three platforms already exist for quite some time, but it has turned out that the performance was not up to the mark for big sync folders. The reason was mainly that too much communication between the file manager plugin and the client was happening. Once asked about the sync state of a single file, the client had to jump through quite some hoops in order to retrieve the required information. That involved not only database access to the sqlite-based sync journal, but also file system interaction to gather file information. Not a big deal if it’s only a few, but if the user syncs huge amounts, these efforts do sum up. ...

This is the third and final part of a little blog series about a new chunking algorithm that we discussed in ownCloud. You might be interested to read the first two parts ownCloud Chunking NG and Announcing an Upload as well. This part makes a couple of ideas how the new chunking could be useful with a future feature of incremental sync (also called delta sync) in ownCloud. In preparartion of delta sync the server could provide another new WebDAV route: remote.php/dav/blocks. ...

Recently Thomas and me met in person and thought about an alternative approach to bring our big file chunking to the next level. “Big file chunking” is ownClouds algorithm to upload huge files to ownCloud with clients. This is the first of three little blog posts in which we want to present the idea and get your feedback. This is for open discussion, nothing is set in stone so far. ...

Today, we’re happy to release the best ownCloud Desktop Client ever to our community and users! It is ownCloud Client 1.8.0 and it will push syncing with ownCloud to a new level of performance, stability and convenience. [caption id=“attachment_586” align=“alignleft” width=“300”] The Share Dialog[/caption]This release brings a new integration into the operating system file manager. With 1.8.0, there is a new context menu that opens a dialog to allow the user to create a public link on a synced file. This link can be forwarded to other users who get access to the file via ownCloud. ...

Often questions come up about the meaning of FileIDs and ETags. Both values are metadata that the ownCloud Server stores for each of the files and directories in the server database. These values are fundamentally important for the integrity of data in the overall system. Here are some thoughts about what they are why these are so important.This is mainly from a clients point of view, but there are other use cases as well. ...

Our recent ownCloud Client 1.7.0 release contains the new feature of overlay icons in GNOME nautilus, MacOSX and Windows. That is nice, but that makes us as old KDE guys sad as Dolphin was missing on the list. [caption id=“attachment_536” align=“alignnone” width=“554”] KDE’s Dolphin with overlay icons for ownCloud’s file sync[/caption] That needs to change, and here we go: Olivier Goffart wrote a patch to do overlay icons also in Dolphin, which was not straightforward, because in addition to an dolphin plugin, also a patch for libkonq was required. ...

Yesterday we released ownCloud Client 1.7.0. It is available via ownCloud’s website. This client release marks the next big step in open source file synchronization technology and I am very happy that it is out now. The new release brings two lighthouse features which I’ll briefly describe here. Overlay icons For the first time, this release has a feature that lives kind of outside the ownCloud desktop client program. That nicely shows that syncing is not only a functionality living in one single app, but a deeply integrated system add-on that affects various levels of desktop computing. ...

End of last week, we have released version 1.6.1 of the ownCloud Client, the desktop tool that does file syncing with your ownCloud. Read on the Desktop Client page how to get and install it. The recommendation is to update your installation to this version. The previous version 1.6.0 had great new features, first and foremost the parallel up- and download of files and a way more performant handling of the local sync journal. That required a lot of code changes. Unfortunately that also brought in some bugs which are now fixed with the 1.6.1 release. ...

Have you ever wondered why openSUSE is the platform for development? Because it offers all that is needed for professional development, also if development goes beyond the basics. A nice proof that openSUSE has more than others was posted here by our friend Thomas, a convinced Debian user. He writes about setting up openSUSE in vagrant to be easily able to build (master build) the ownCloud Client for Win32 in it. Very easy and cool stuff. But that can be even easier without vagrant through this link ;-). ...