Evernote has been recently hacked. Dropbox has been hacked many times. Who knows what’s going in the other services we are using. So I decided to phase out my cloud service providers and create my own cloud. There are bunch of ways of running this tool. For instance, you can just download a VM image with everything installed. I decided to start from scratch and perform a manual installation on a new Ubuntu server. It’s very easy. First we need to install dependencies:

apt-get install apache2 php5 php5-gd php-xml-parser php5-intl
apt-get install php5-sqlite php5-mysql smbclient curl libcurl3 php5-curl

Then extract the downladed compressed file:

tar -xjf path/to/downloaded/owncloud-x.x.x.tar.bz2
cp -r owncloud /path/to/your/webserver

Set the directory permissions:

chown -R www-data:www-data /path/to/your/owncloud/

Enable .htaccess by settings AllowOverride to “All” in /var/www directory in Apache config which is in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default on Ubuntu Finally run mod_rewrite:

a2enmod rewrite
a2enmod headers

I got these instructions from Admin Manual which can be found here: ownCloud Admin Manual It’s quite straighforward. Then all we have to do is navigate to login page, create an admin account and start uploading files:

My favourite features are:

• Ability to share password protected links with specific users
• Ability to set expiry date to shared files
• Ability to sync mulitple local folders (it doesn’t have to mimic the directory structure of server, you can select and map separate folders)
• Supports plugins. A simple note taking plugin is quite helpful to take and sync notes. Also I installed YubiAuth plugin which supposedly enables using my Yubikey with it. But couldn’t make it work yet. My only negative observation about it is SMTP settings didn’t work. When I tried to send someone a link of shared file I got a bizarre error. On their forums I saw other people having similar problems. To me it’s not a crucial issue (as a single user, who am I going to mail anyway) but for an organization it may quickly become an annoying issue.