I wanted to bring your attention to a great resource written by one of our community members. Getting started with ownCloud, written by Aditya Patawari, is a great way to learn how to set up and run ownCloud – and to get the most out of it.
While this is not an “official” ownCloud book, Aditya did give me an opportunity to write the book’s forward:
“The advantages of storing data in the cloud are many: ubiquitous access to data from multiple devices, social interaction and sharing with others on the web and no extra software to install. However, in exchange for this privilege, YOUR data is often stored on — and even OWNED by — one of several organizations — none of which easily allow interaction or sharing of data among them. Besides these convenience issues, there are also problems with privacy and security as well as the potential for one hardware failure to make the data of thousands of users impossible to access. Taken together, the cloud is not perfect.
ownCloud is the first and most ubiquitous FOSS solution to run on the server or computer of the user or on an internal company server — giving the user the benefits of cloud computing and control of the data. ownCloud integrates with desktop applications so that the users has cloud features combined with the security and the good cost structure of in house file servers.
This was my main motivation for starting the ownCloud free software project in 2010 and also ownCloud Inc. later. Aditya is an active member of the ownCloud community for a long time and I’m happy that he collected a lot of useful information for beginners and advanced users here in this book. Have fun reading it.”
So I urge you to pick up a copy, and get started on ownCloud today!