Introduction

Dropbox is good for file syncing and sharing, but is not an ideal place for collaboration. So we build Seafile, a better place for managing documents together.

In Seafile, you can create groups with file syncing, wiki, discussion and tasks. It enables you to easily collaborate around documents within a team. In addition, it is open source. So you can build a private cloud freely for your organization.

Feature Summary

Seafile is a full-fledged document collaboration platform. It has following features:

1. Groups with file syncing, wiki, discussion and tasks.
2. Managing files into libraries. Each library can be synced separately.
3. Sync with existing folders.
4. File revisions.
5. Library encryption with a user chosen password.

Compared to other open-source Dropbox-like projects, such as https://github.com/hbons/SparkleShare, Seafile has several advantages:

1. Mature, reliable, production-ready file syncing algorithm.
2. Doesn't depend on Git.
3. Not a Dropbox-clone, but a newly designed product for teamwork.

Internal

Seafile uses GIT's version control model, but simplified for automatic synchronization, and doesn't depend on GIT. Every library is like a GIT repository. It has its own unique history, which consists of a list of commits. A commit points to the root of a file system snapshot. The snapshot consists of directories and files. Files are further divided into blocks for more efficient network transfer and storage usage.

Differences to GIT:

1. Automatic syncing.
2. Clients do not store file history, thus avoids the overhead of storing data twice. GIT is not efficient for larger files (such as images).
3. Files are further divided into blocks for more efficient network transfer and storage usage.
4. File transfer can be resumed.
5. Support different storage backends on the server side.
6. Support downloading from multiple block servers for accelerating file transfer.
7. More user-friendly file conflicts handling similar to Dropbox (Add user's name as suffix to conflicted file).
8. Gracefully handles corner cases that user modifies files when auto-sync is running. GIT is not designed to work in these cases.

Build and Run

See https://github.com/haiwen/seafile/wiki

Change Logs

See https://seacloud.cc/group/3/wiki/home/

Why Open Source

Our primary goal is to build a first-class level production. Since we are only a small team, we think the goal can only be achieved by collaborating with the whole world.

Contact

Twitter: @seafile https://twitter.com/seafile

Google Group: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/seafile