Ifolder Server Review

liquidat writes "I wanted to have a look at the new Open Source ifolder-server and additionally at ifolder in general. ifolder is mainly supported by Novell, and Novell advertises it's Suse Linux, so I downloaded a Suse-VMware image, installed the vmware player and gave it a try. After I installed the needed software it worked pretty well and gave me a quite good impression of what ifolder is about."

Comments

iFolder for Windows -- locking issues?!

[garcia]

I haven't used iFolder (on Windows/Novell) since 2005 but that's because of horrible locking. We were using it to share a "log file" document for keeping track of what documents were mailed from our department across two campuses.

I was the main user of this document and would add 50 to 60 entries at any one time. iFolder wouldn't let me know that someone else had the file open and if I would save it with the other person's version open, I risked losing my work (which happened twice before I scrapped the idea and moved to another solution which included using a shared e-mail folder in Groupwise).

iFolder, at the time, was insecure, slow, and problematic. Hopefully with it going out to the community these issues will be resolved.

Re:iFolder for Windows -- locking issues?!

[shrapnull]

Maybe that would be a nice feature, but it's not what it's designed to do.

iFolder

Re:iFolder for Windows -- locking issues?!

[baptiste]

I assume you were using v2. v2 had no sharing ability (so you probably used a single userid for that iFolder) and I can see why you would have had locking problems. It seems like a normal NSS folder (since you mention you had Novell) would have been MUCH better as NSS has built in version control for files.

v3 has much better sharing support in it, but even then, for the use case you describe, an NSS folder would be the way to go.

What is ifolder?

[Pedrito]

It would be nice if you gave a quick description of what exactly iFolder is. From reading the article posting, the first few paragraphs of your blog, and the link in the first paragraph of your blog, I know it's written in GTK# and that it's from Novell, but I still have no idea what the hell it is and now I don't care anymore.

To the editors, please reject stories that don't describe what new products (or not commonly known products) are so that people can have some clue right away whether or not they want to bother reading the story.

I don't know if I want to read this because I don't know what ifolder is and I obviously can't figure it out without reading a lot more of the article than I want.

Re:What is ifolder?

[Bazman]

Some fine stating-of-the-obvious in that article:

"If you are going to share quite a big amount of data over this server, the server itself should have enough storage since it keeps a copy of every file"

  Where else did you think it was going to keep a copy?

  I think its basically an MS Sharepoint-type document sharing solution, of which you will find umpteen other examples on freshmeat.net.

http://freshmeat.net/search/?q=document+management &section=projects&Go.x=0&Go.y=0

Several of them even claim to be 'Enterprise-class' or 'professional'. Now an article comparing all of these with 'iserver' and sharepoint would be worth frontpaging on slashdot..

Barry

Re:What is ifolder?

[soccercoach62]

According to http://www.ifolder.com/: " iFolder is a simple and secure storage solution that can increase your productivity by enabling you to back up, access and manage your personal files-from anywhere, at any time. Once you have installed iFolder, you simply save your files locally-as you have always done-and iFolder automatically updates the files on a network server and delivers them to the other machines you use. Sponsored by Novell, the iFolder project is built on the Mono/.Net framework to integrate seamlessly into existing desktop environments. "

One of Novell's Coolest Products

[baptiste]

We used iFolder 2 in a Novell cluster and it was a really nice product. Our laptop users loved it. None of the hassles of Windows offline folders (which seems to try to use a sledgehammer to nail in a tack) iFolder simply sits in the background and watches your iFolder for changes/new files and seamlessly syncs them with the iFolder on the server. You could use an SSL browser w/Java to view your iFolder from other PCs, etc. The one thing that took a while to get yoru head around was that the file store on the server was encrypted, making backup interesting. But you could link the user with the directory name (which was a hash of some kind) so restores of an iFolder were possible, but restores of a single file were not. The benefit was the files were 'pre' encrypted so you didn't have to encrypt the files on teh fly. But the obvious downside was how to get granular backups. Not sure how v3 is handling that.

v3 of iFolder definitely takes it to the next level with the ability to share iFolders with others and the ability to have multiple iFolders. I've got the rpms on hand and am setting up a Virtual Server to give it a whirl here myself.

Remember - v3 of the server JUST got released as open source. They've been banging on it VERY hard so I don't expect it to be flawless. But its a very exciting product.

As for the windows locking issues - unless that's something the commentor saw in v3 - we had a lot of iFolder users and never saw locking problems, even from users with laptops and desktops who had iFolder active at the same time. That's one of the appeals for computer geeks with more than one computer - true sync of files between all platforms and the server. If you can afford the space usage, its nice to know that even if the network is down, each unit will have that file you need.

I hope iFolder draws a following - its a sweet product.

Re:FTP

[baptiste]

FTP/SCP requires the server be accessible via a network unless you manually keep copies locally on your laptop for instance. iFolder syncs files between a server store and your local machine (or multiple machines) so you always have a copy. Microsoft Offline Files are a similar concept though I always found the way iFolder handled the sync to be much cleaner than they way MS did it.

All syncing is done over normal SSL HTTP connections (at least in v2 it was)

So iFolder ensures you'll always have your files available, even if you have no network connection (on a plane, etc) and when you get that connection back, makes sure everything is synced.

Really cool use case? Executives with assistants. Executive is travelling - they have all their files locally and those files get 'backed up' to a server when they get connected. But if the assistant has updated a bunch of files as well, the executive will get those updates pushed to their laptop during the next background sync (say in a hotel)

Think an automated version of rsync over ssh. iFolder uses a totally different architecture and has a lot of management and sharing features, but at its simplest use, syncing two folders between a PC and a server, it accomplishes what rsync over ssh would.