Dropbox is good for file syncing and sharing, but is not an ideal place for collaboration. So we build Seafile, a better place for managing documents together.
In Seafile, you can create groups with file syncing, wiki, discussion and tasks. It enables you to easily collaborate around documents within a team. In addition, it is open source. So you can build a private cloud freely for your organization.
Seafile is a full-fledged document collaboration platform. It has following features:
- Groups with file syncing, wiki, discussion and tasks.
- Managing files into libraries. Each library can be synced separately.
- Sync with existing folders.
- File revisions.
- Library encryption with a user chosen password.
Compared to other open-source Dropbox-like projects, such as https://github.com/hbons/SparkleShare, Seafile has several advantages:
- Mature, reliable, production-ready file syncing algorithm.
- Doesn't depend on Git.
- Not a Dropbox-clone, but a newly designed product for teamwork.
Seafile uses GIT's version control model, but simplified for automatic synchronization, and doesn't depend on GIT. Every library is like a GIT repository. It has its own unique history, which consists of a list of commits. A commit points to the root of a file system snapshot. The snapshot consists of directories and files. Files are further divided into blocks for more efficient network transfer and storage usage.
Differences to GIT:
- Automatic syncing.
- Clients do not store file history, thus avoids the overhead of storing data twice. GIT is not efficient for larger files (such as images).
- Files are further divided into blocks for more efficient network transfer and storage usage.
- File transfer can be resumed.
- Support different storage backends on the server side.
- Support downloading from multiple block servers for accelerating file transfer.
- More user-friendly file conflicts handling similar to Dropbox (Add user's name as suffix to conflicted file).
- Gracefully handles corner cases that user modifies files when auto-sync is running. GIT is not designed to work in these cases.
See https://github.com/haiwen/seafile/wiki
- Server http://cloud.seafile.com/f/9629806bbe/
- Desktop Client http://cloud.seafile.com/f/6d54523324/
Twitter: @seafile https://twitter.com/seafile
Google Group: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/seafile