My ownCloud adventures - Part 1: Installation and Initial Configuration

If you own multiple different computing devices (portable computers and Desktop PCs at different places, Smartphones, tablets, ...) - and I bet you do - then you will sooner or later feel the need to share your personal files between them in a seamless, convenient way. You may e.g. want to have your music files and pictures available on any device at any place without manually copying them around. This is why using a Cloud Storage provider is becoming more and more popular: Dropbox, Google Drive, Box.net, ... just to name a few. They will offer you a limited amount of online storage for free - if you pay them a monthly fee then you will get more. However, if you want to have a lot of space (1 TB, 2 TB?) then this will get very expensive ... and there are also other concerns: Data security, privacy, ...

Luckily there is software available that enables you to be your own Cloud Storage provider like the Open Source solution ownCloud. I have started playing with ownCloud in my hosted virtual lab and will blog about how I got this up and running, configured for my needs, and what else is needed to make good use of it. This first post is about installing and initial configuration.

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