Synology Cloud Station

If you have a Synology (DSM 6 or newer) then this is a one click install.

It does pretty much everything Owncloud does, but with some marked advantages.

Primarily you can access the files directly on the server; if you share out a folder, and you drop a file into the folder on the server (use cp command for example) Cloud Station will handle it.

With ownCloud, you deal with the file store on the server as a sealed container; the files are in there, but you can't touch them. This means essentially you are reduced to either only accessing them via WebDAV (slow) or you have to keep a separate duplicate copy on the server (running ownCloud client) requiring twice the disk space.

Cloud Sync

This is related... really it's a client for WebDAV services that you can run on the Synology. You can sync a folder with a cloud services, for example, Dropbox or Google Drive or Onedrive, so that you keep a copy of your files on the Synology.

You could share a Dropbox by syncing it to the Synology and then publishing it as a file share.

You could have the spaces overlap, I have not tried this, so for example you could keep your Dropbox folder inside your CloudStation folder and whenever a Dropbox file changes it would change on your CloudStation clients.

Todo

Backups

What's the best way to back up the file store? Synology has many options.

How best to use one way sync?

I think this would be good for copying photos from my phone to my server.

It would be good for delivering files to a customer when you don't want them modified.