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."

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:iFolder for Windows -- locking issues?!

[fm6]

Filesharing != Collaboration

. Bullshit [answers.com].

Re:iFolder for Windows -- locking issues?!

[shrapnull]

I can give you the definition of Troll too, but it's not literal when used in geekspeak. You can fileshare with yourself, just like this product explicitly implies on it's webpage that it is for personal files to be shared across multiple computers. Collaboration would have versioning control, multiuser (concurrent), file-locking, etc...

This just isn't that big of a product. Whether it will be or not, is up to the development team, but it does exactly what they say it does.

Re:iFolder for Windows -- locking issues?!

[fm6]

OK, you're right. I was too quick off the mark.