Goodbye SugarSync

In an effort to improve my security and privacy online I’ve finally dumped SugarSync for a self hosted solution.

I’ve spent a few months looking for an alternate solution to SugarySync, i’ve tried OwnCloud which turned out to be a real disaster and landed on Seafile.

While OwnCloud has a nicer GUI, it’s horribly buggy. The desktop sync client is slow and resource intensive. Plus I ran into an issue where two computers kept battling over same set of files (uploading/downloading back and forth) even though those files haven’t changed in years.

Seafile is for the lack of a better word, incredible. Very easy to configure, fast and comes with full mobile support. One of the coolest features is the ability to ignore files/directories by simply creating a seafile-ignore.txt file in the root of the library and adding whatever file masks to skip, a feature that SugarSync users have been asking for FOR YEARS. While not perfect (I’m running 3.0 Beta), it’s a pretty polished product and sufficiently stable to be used in production.

Incidentally configuring Seafile was also the first time i used Nginx as opposed to Apache. It’s going to be a while before I get comfortable with the configuration file format but so far I’m liking it.

I’m still looking for self-hosted alternatives for Evernote, LastPass and XMarks…the search continues.