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

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?

[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.