While I was out of town for work, I gave Owncloud its first real test from a remote location. My laptop and android phone synced perfectly.
Like Dropbox, the Owncloud app can auto-sync the photos on your mobile device if you let it.
However, I did notice the Owncloud app has to be running in order for files to automatically sync in the background. I did not spend a lot of time investigating this, but Google seems to indicate this is not by design.
Here are some other installation notes:
- No weird ports need to be opened on your firewall. You only need port 443 open.
- Owncloud is current up to version 10.x, but only owncloud 9.x is available in epel for centos 7, no doubt due to the php 7 requirements in owncloud 10.x. I don't want to hack my Centos 7 server with php 7. I'll just wait until CentOS 8 is released.
- Owncloud can use multiple dropbox, onedrive, etc services as the storage backend(s) if you want (optionally with it's own transparent encyrption). Unfortunately the Dropbox add-on in Owncloud 9 is dated and no longer works with the latest dropbox. I'll try this again after I upgrade to Centos 8 then Owncloud 10.
- Owncloud docker container is available if you choose
So far, I've only synced moderately sized pdf's. I have not yet synced any really large files.