Introduction

Seafile enables you to build private cloud for file sharing and collaboration among team members in your company/organization.

First you create a file library in the web and upload files to it. Then you share it into a team or with another user.

File libraries can also be synchronized among computers and mobile devices. You download a library to your PC. Whenever you add, delete or edit a file, the latest version be uploaded to the server automatically and then be synchronized to everyone's computer.

Feature Summary

Seafile can be used to build a full-fledged cloud storage platform. It has following features:

1. Each library can be synced separately.
2. Sync with existing folders.
3. Groups, users can create and join groups.
4. File revisions.
5. File comments, event notifications,
6. 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

Contact

Twitter: @seafile

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