Sparkleshare is an open source tool to synchronize your files in the cloud and it can use a GitHub, Gitorious or your own private GIT server. For now, SparkleShare is easy to install under Linux and Mac, "but it’s hard to get running and it doesn’t integrate well with the system" on Windows, says Hylke, the SparkleShare developer. Android and iPhone clients might be released in the future too.
The first stable Sparkleshare version (0.2) was released earlier this month, getting a pluggable backend and experimental Mercurial support. This means it might get support for other protocols in the future, like SFTP, etc.
Other changes in the SparkleShare 0.2:
- Added support for Growl to show notifications on Mac.
- Removed the dependency on GitSharp.
- File rename detection support in the event logs.
- Fixed all crashes reported in RC1 and improved sync algorithm.
- Redid collision detection and conflict resolving (use a copy of each version).
- Improved about dialogs with version checking.
Install SparkleShare
There is a new stable SparkleShare Ubuntu PPA, available for Ubuntu 11.10, 11.04 and 10.10. Add it and install SparkleShare using the commands below:
mkdir -p ~/.ssh
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:warp10/sparkleshare
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install sparkleshare libwebkit1.1-cil git-coreThe "mkdir -p ~/.ssh" command is required because if the ~/.ssh folder doesn't exist, SparkleShare crashes.
For Nautilus integration, also install "python-nautilus":
sudo apt-get install python-nautilusOnce you install this package (for some reason, it's not automatically installed by SparkleShare), you can get previous versions of a file or copy its web link. Unfortunately, at least in Natty, the sync status file emblems are not displayed (and I've tested it on two Natty computers).
There's also a SparkleShare Fedora repository @ http://repos.fedorapeople.org/repos/alexh/sparkleshare/
For Mac binaries and source files, see the SparkleShare homepage.
Setting up SparkleShare is not very complicated, but there are a few things you must do to get it working. But we've already covered this, so check out the following posts:
Also see: how to encrypt files before syncing in SparkleShare (for an easier way, you can use EncFS like in this post).
New via SparkleShare blog and Synancy @ Twitter.
