With ownCloud, we provide fully-featured file sync and sharing solution, with access to your data through a web interface, sync clients or WebDAV, while providing a platform to view, sync and share files across your devices easily all under your control.
This is an extremely useful feature, as it lets you synchronize your most important files to our cloud storage, keeping them safely backed up for up to 30 days. Besides that, it lets you install the ownCloud app on your mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, so that your files are easily accessible from wherever you are. There’s more… You can also view and edit your files with an easy to use, visually clear and fast interface and share files with external users, using safe links generated by ownCloud, protect them my password and even set an expiration date for them.
You can even edit PDF, text and Office files using the web interface (https://files.emailarray.com), complete with revisions available for each copy you edited, with the option to roll back to a previous version of the file (up to 30 days).
Enhanced accounts have the advantage of being able to share files between users, including revision control, which details changes made to a file which is accessed by several users. You can even work at one same file at the same time as a colleague and, in real time, owncloud shows you who is editing what (text) with a differentiated color. If you have an existing Enhanced account, please open a ticket so that we can enable Owncloud in your account.
We are offering 5 gigabytes of space on ownCloud FREE to each basic e-mail account and 15 GB for enhanced accounts.
You can easily setup ownCloud to sync files from your local computer/devices (smartphones/tablets) to our ownCloud storage.
Logging in the web interface and downloading the sync client
Our goal with this FAQ is to get your started with the sync client. First of all, access https://files.emailarray.com and login with your e-mail address and respective password.
Authentication credentials are the same as your e-mail account, thanks to our single sign-on technology.
After you first login, ownCloud offers you the desktop client (Windows, OSX or Linux) and apps for both Android and iOS.
We’ll focus on the desktop client. You can download the apps for mobile devices later, accessing from them.
When you click to download the desktop client, you are taken to https://owncloud.org/sync-clients/
In the Sync section (step 2), click on Desktop Clients and choose the version you desire, Windows, Mac or Linux.
Before installing the setup file you downloaded, feel free to take a look around ownCloud’s web interface, create a new text file, edit it online, share the example files with external users (link), etc.
Regarding sharing, you can share files with other users of your domain, by clicking on the “Share” link next to each file and typing in your colleague’s e-mail address. The system will find the address and you must click on it. The file will be shown on the side in “Shared with others” and for the user you shared it with, in “Shared with you”. You can also click on the Share link and then mark the check box “Share Link”, which is a very useful feature that lets you provide a secure link for anyone to be able to download the file, with options such as password protection and expiration of the link.
Regarding deleted files, you can restore them in the “Deleted files” link, on the bottom left. Then, pass your mouse over the file you want to restore and click on the “Restore” link.
Consider watching this short introduction video (5:14 min.): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrAhClhrRAc
Let’s proceed to installing the Sync client on your computer.
Installing sync client on your desktop computer
Install the setup file, choose the Standard installation, click on Next twice and then click on Install.
At the end of the installation, ownCloud will offer the option to load it (checkbox enabled by default).
After it loads, you are requested for the server address. Type in: https://files.emailarray.com and click on Next.
In the username field, type in your full e-mail address, its respective password and click on Next.
ownCloud will now offer to sync all files on the server. If you haven’t used our service before, then you don’t have any of your files stored by us yet, rather just a few test files that ownCloud adds itself to every new account, approximately 3 MB. So you can safely keep the default to sync all files from Cloud to your computer, which is useful even so you can start to understand how it works.
The default directory used by ownCloud is the owncloud folder under your Users folder, on your local computer. You can easily change such location, if needed.
Click on Connect and then two options will be shown.
– Open ownCloud in browser – same as accessing https://files.emailarray.com from your browser. Lets you see all files stored on your cloud storage, even being able to view, create, edit and share files.
– Open local folder – opens your local computer folder which is synced to your cloud storage. If you click here, you will probably notice that the example files added by ownCloud to your account have already been synced to your local ownCloud folder.
Click on Finish.
Sync client settings
Let’s now open ownCloud program, recently installed on your computer again. Below, a few tips on the main sections of the desktop client interface:
– The first tab, which mentions your account, shows you how much space you’re using on cloud storage and lets you add folders for synchronization.
The Add folder to Synchronize button will be dimmed out. If you want to change your local sync directory, you will need to click on the … icon next to current folder used for sync (probably ownCloud folder, as explained before) and click to remove it. Now you will be able to change your local sync directory.
When you add a new directory for sync, you first choose the local directory and, in the next step, where in the remote cloud storage you want to sync that directory with, if the root “owncloud” and all subfolder or only some subfolder(s).
If you choose to sync a local folder to “owncloud root”, you are unable to add more directories to sync, as seen initially. If you set to sync local directories to certain folders in your cloud storage, then you’re able to add several folders for synchronization.
Perhaps the easiest, is the default, of syncing your users ownCloud local folder with the remote owncloud root and store all files you want to sync, in your local owncloud directory, even moving existing directories to here.
If there are files/folders you don’t want to sync, you have to specify them in the General tab, under Edit ignored files. For example, in your local owncloud folder you don’t want to sync files in the subfolder games. Simply add a new file to ignore and type in games. You will see, in the Activity Manager tab, that it will be bypassed.
Edit ignored files is also useful if there are folders/files in ownCloud that you don’t want to sync back to your local computer, all you have to do is specify their names.
– Under Activity, ownCloud shows you status of files synced to/from your cloud storage.
– In the General tab, you might want to mark the checkbox to Launch on System Startup, so that ownCloud will always be enabled on your computer, sycing files from/to your cloud storage.
Apps for mobile devices
In the case of Android, ownCloud’s app has a small cost of US$ 0,99. An alternative is a free app called ocloud for owncloud, which has been tested by us and works fine.
For iOS, the paid official app costs also US$ 0,99. The only free alternatives we found for iOS are developed by universties that use ownCloud, such as South Oregon University’s app (search for “SOU owncloud” in the app store), which does work if you specify our host *https://files.emailarray.com*.
We do recommend, however, the paid official app and can’t be responsable for the apps provided by third party.