Before you start synchronizing your files between desktop, mobile devices, and hosted ownCloud server, you would like to try it in localhost. For this, you will need to download and install the ownCloud sync client. Using it, you can synchronize files between a folder on your computer and ownCloud server. After setup, the synchronization process works in the background, and you can see the most recent version of the files in both the locations (local and remote servers).
Here you will see how to test the desktop sync client for Windows. This tutorial follows the tutorial on installing ownCloud server in localhost.
Note: The procedure below will work if both the ownCloud-server and ownCloud-client are running on the same computer.
1) Download and install the sync client for your platform from http://owncloud.org/sync-clients. We are using the Windows client.
2) Make sure Apache, PHP, and MySQL are running in your local server installation.
3) Run the sync client. Connection wizard will open. Write the server address. We have installed ownCloud server in “localhost/owncloud”.
4) You might see an SSL certificate warning if SSL is enabled on your local server. While testing you can tick on “Trust this certificate anyway”, and click OK.
5) Enter the user credentials you created while installing the ownloud server. Click Next.
6) In the next step, it will ask you to setup a local folder which you want to syncronize with the server. Create a blank folder and select this folder in the field “Local folder”. We created a blank folder “D:\MyOwnCloudSync”.
Click on “Connect...”.
The folder you just specified will be synchronized with the ownCloud server. You can test it by keeping some files in the folder. These files will be uploaded to the ownCloud server in background.
If you are considering to choose a hosting for ownCloud, you can see our detailed guide on how to choose an ownCloud hosting.
