Speaker
Description
We'll present two recent innovative file syncing technology in Seafile: the Drive client and real-time backup server.
Seafile Drive Client
First introduced by Dropbox in around 2007, file syncing has become a more and more common technology in the last few years. Services like Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive are more or less similar to each other: syncing/replicating files across users' computers. However, we believe there is another innovative and useful way to access files in cloud storage. Cloud storage can be mapped into user's computer as a virtual hard drive, without syncing files to client computer. Seafile Drive client is designed for this usage mode.
There are two main advantages for the Drive client:
- Users can use cloud storage like a local drive on Windows. It's the most intuitive and familiar way for most users.
- Local disk space can be freed up because users don't need to replicate files in the cloud to local disk.
With the Drive client, organizations can use Seafile to replace Samba/Windows Share. Users can access files in Seafile server just like accessing a Windows network drive. Seafile Drive client also has one advantage over Windows Share: files are cached in local disk. When users go offline, they can still access cached files.
The Drive client also opens up novel application in scientific research data management. Large volume of experimental data can be written directly to the cloud, through the Drive client.
Real-time backup server
We'll also give an introduction to the real-time backup feature. Data can be backup in a almost real-time manner, from one Seafile server to another Seafile server. Full history data is also backed up. Compared to traditional daily backup, this greatly reduce the backup window. It can also be used as multi-site replication mechanism, to provide higher availability for Seafile service.
