One of the goals of AwaOS is to make data backup automatic so that beginner PC users don’t have to go through all trouble that those of us with more experience have had to over the years. This requires tying in lots of services and applications in a way that doesn’t require user intervention. The easy thing to do would be to sign up AwaOS users to existing free but commercial services such as DropBox, a service I rely on completely and highly recommend if your PC has plenty of RAM to spare (it is quite hungry for a system tray app using 50-70MB). However, using a commercial service in this way, no matter how free, would still go against the principles of AwaOS. Therefore I have been on the lookout for an Open Source alternative.
Today I happened upon the iFolder server and client solution by Kablink, sponsored by Novell. While I haven’t tried this out yet, the beauty of iFolder is that, apparently, not only can you run your own server (and thus not rely on some company staying in business or being limited to their free disk quota), but you can assign files and folders throughout the file system to be synced rather than requiring all synced data to be in a certain folder.
While a cursory search doesn’t show up any packages yet for Ubuntu, the client and server will apparently install fine on Maverick (out in about 23 days), so packaging should not be impossible. The next question is whether they’ll install on PPC hardware, but as there is a Mac OS X version of the client available, I can’t imagine the Linux source wouldn’t compile on PPC as well.
At any rate, this is definitely a project to watch. And being open source, the sky is the limit with regards to tweaking the client if, say, it uses a bit more memory than I’m comfortable with.
