Cloud Storage with smart/on-demand sync Linux client?
Like OneDrive for Windows or iCloud on MacOS. So files only her downloaded when needed and you can specify directories/files to be available offline.
Needs to integrate into nautilus context menu with the option to get a shareable link through that. Though I'm open to switching my file manager. Nextcloud can do it but the feature is experimental and every time I restart it just syncs everything again.
Gnome online accounts doesn't let you specify folders to be available offline. Onedriver is the same and I'd like to stop paying MS money. Plus neither integrate into nautilus' context menu.
It's the one thing I really miss from win 11. Basically all folders I worked were synced and for a secondary backup I synced OneDrive to a NAS. My Cloud Storage is bigger than the available space on my machine. I could do insync with selective sync, it nautilus integration as well. But that's just not as elegant as smart/on demand sync, having everything available in your file manager when you need it.
Seafile has an sshfs style client for windows, mac and Linux. Rather than a traditional folder sync like Dropbox (which seafile also has), seadrive mounts a remote connection to your library that you can browse in your file explorer. I've only used the windows version, it has little cloud icons that show the files are not local and then you can right click a folder of file and "make available locally" to have offline access. This sounds exactly like that you are looking for. Full gui access to all files with no local storage needed unless you want.
I haven't tried seadrive on Linux but they have the option on their site. I use the standard seafile-client on Linux and choose only certain libraries to use with no issues. On windows the seadrive is quite impressive in regard to how well it works.
https://help.seafile.com/drive_client/drive_client_for_linux/
Excellent, I'll have a look at it. Thank you!
I'm not really understanding the use case. Why can't you take advantage of the NAS? I heard good things about Syncthing
It's a shitty Synology Nas with extreme slow speeds. That's only amplified by slow upload speeds when I'm not in my local network.
The main difference, and that's also the difference to the way Gnome handles cloud storage like GDrive, is that I don't want a network storage. I want integration into my file system, and I want automatic upload of what I'm working on. And I want the ability to say: this directory needs to be available offline. Without having to copy it from my nas to local storage and back again.
I've not had a problem with nextclouds experimental selective sync. Have you tried clearing all your nextcloud dotfiles and setting it up from scratch?
Question on NC. The last time I used it, it stored all files in a db (sql of choice). Is it still doing that? Or are they in a folder structure now? I had an issue where the db file got corrupted, and I lost everything. I had a folder structure backup, because I didn't trust sql for file storage, but it's the reason I haven't gone back to NC.
I think they store the data about the files in a database, but the files are in a folder structure.
Doesn't make sense to have data that could be a few gigabytes in a database, or maybe that's just me.
Not just you. It didn't make sense to me either, which is why it struck me as odd, and why I kept a separate backup. This was a long while ago, so things, it seems, have changed (unsurprisingly with NC, for the better).
Next cloud has never stored the files themselves in a db. I've been using it since before it existed (own cloud) and then switched, it always has had a flat file storage that you can just backup and browse without the metadata from the database if you want.
Unfortunately that's also part of it's Achilles heel and why it's so slow, it's not optimized.
Maybe it was the lack of metadata? I'm not sure, it's been a while since I used it last. I'll try to spin it up again and see how it does for my usecase now. I really only used it for file storage.