I travel about six months of each year, and I have to be able to access my photos and files from a laptop on the road as well as from a PC in my home office. I’m using DropBox , and it integrates well with KDE such that there simply appears to be a folder called “Dropbox” in /home that is actually my DropBox account on line. That transparent integration is saving me huge amounts of time by simplifying my workflow. It’s worked well for me for a couple of years.
So far so good, however the volume of photos I’m now storing on line is growing fast. As it grows my hard drive fills up fast on both computers. Because DropBox sync’s files on each as well as on it’s own server I’m constantly having to “selectively sync” files in order to maintain free space on the PCs. What this means is that I have to use the browser based app to access any of those selectively sync’d files if needed.
I really don’t care that my less needed files are only on-line, but I’d like to be able to see them in my file manager, etc. as well as the ones that are fully sync’d. DropBox offers a feature called “Smart Sync” that allows one to specify certain files and folders that are only stored on-lline but are still used in the same way as before, however it’s only available for Windows and Mac (surprise, surprise). There’s an add-on for Nautilus that’s supposed to allow smart sync to work on Linux, but I’m completely unable to get it to work. From what I read on line, I suspect nobody else has been able to either.
I have looked at a dozen other competitive hosting companies, but no joy so far. I really don’t want to set up my own server, as Im regularly on the road for six months at a time.
For any files you don’t mind made public (or willing to pay to make private), I’d recommend github.
Free for publicly viewable access, you’d not only have practically unlimited server storage for <small> files like typical text and images, you can create as many “repositories” as you wish according to whatever reasons you might have… like different sync strategies (manual only), categories, uses, whatever.
Sync is simple, you just run “git pull” in the directory on your own machine. Just make sure you always run that command before you make any changes to files in that directory and you can avoid merge issues when your directories get out of sync (This is what happens when sync doesn’t happen automatically). Or, if merging is too much of a headache, I just wipe the local directory and sync down the files from the server fresh.
The bonus of course for using Github is its versioning file system, if you change files or accidentally delete, you can recover or roll back to the version you want.
That’s my personal strategy…
For all small document and image files, I keep private files in Dropbox or Google Drive or MS OneDrive or whatever depending on what machines I use to access those services (Dropbox is my favorite to support all OS).
But, anything I have no privacy issues with, I put them on Github. And, github is also particularly good at being supported on all OS platforms.
Gitlab allows its users to have private repositories (for free), so no need to share your files with the rest of the world.
I use its private repositories to store my novels and salt states, salt pillar data and ansible playbooks, with all the advantages that TSU mentioned in his previous post.