CloudSync with Linux

Modified on Tue, 18 Nov, 2014 at 10:57 PM

Although CloudSync desktop software is only available for Windows and Mac, users of Linux can still choose to use the "Share" and "Team" accounts (which provide a shared drive in the Cloud) using FTP.

Basic setup
Click "Places" from the Desktop menu and choose "Connect to server"



Now type in "FTPdrive.ukCloudSync.net" into the "Server" field, together with your registered email address as the "User Name". Type a bookmark name such as "FTPdrive" and click "Connect"



Finally, when prompted to enter your password; you may want to "Remember" the password. Click "Connect". 



Advanced setup
A quick Internet search for "linux ftp mount" will show you various ways of connecting a drive to your Linux file system using FTP. A common way to do it is with CurlFtpFS (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTPFS). As with the basic guide above, this would add a "live" FTP drive to the file system. However, a more advanced technique 'mirrors' a folder on the local file system with the FTP drive in the Cloud; we're going to do this with Lftp (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lftp):

From a Terminal install the Lftp package: sudo apt-get install lftp
Now it's installed we can use a text editor to create a script:

lftp -u myRegistered@email.address,myRegisteredPassword
FTPdrive.ukCloudSync.net/
mirror -R -v ~/ .
quit


Now save it to your home folder and call it ukCloudSync

Now run the script to perform an initial sync. Once you've got everything uploaded you may want to schedule it to run automatically...
Open the scheduler: crontab -e
And add the following line to make the script run every hour:

0 * * * * lftp -f ~/ukCloudSync

Script modification: (This will only backup the Documents folder, rather than your entire file system)

 FTPdrive.ukCloudSync.net/Documents/
 mirror -R -v ~/Documents/ . 




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