nextcloud-desktop/doc/visualtour.rst

Visual Tour

visual tour, usage

ownCloud Client stays in the background, and is visible as an icon in your system tray (Windows, KDE), status bar (Mac OS X) or notification area (Ubuntu), like so:

If a setup is still required, it will open the setup. Otherwise, the main menu is opened, which provides several options and displays progress information:

Here is an explanation of the individual items in the menu:

• Open ownCloud in browser: Opens the ownCloud web interface
• Open folder 'ownCloud': Opens the local folder. If you have defined multiple sync targets, you should see multiple entries here.
• Disk space indicator: Shows how much space is used up on the server.
• Operation indicator: Shows the status of the current sync process, or Up to date if server and client are in sync.
• Recent Changes: shows the last six files modified by sync operations, and provides access to the Sync status, which lists all changes since the last restart of ownCloud Client.
• Settings...: provides access to the settings menu.
• Help: Opens a browser to display this help.
• Quit ownCloud: Quits ownCloud, ending a currently running sync run.

The settings dialog is split up in three categories: Account Settings, General Settings and Network Settings:

Account Settings

account settings, user, password, Server URL

The Account Settings tab provides an executive summary about the synced folders in your account and allows to modify them. It also provides a more detailed report about the storage usage. Finally, it allows to change the files that ownCloud Client should ignore (for details, see the Ignored Files Editor section below), and to modify various aspects of the current account settings, such as user name, password and server URL.

General Settings

general settings, auto start, startup, desktop notifications

The tab provides several useful options:

• Launch on System Startup: This option is automatically activated once a user has conimaged his account. Unchecking the box will cause ownCloud client to not launch on startup for a particular user.
• Show Desktop Nofications: Do not show bubble notifications whenever a set of sync operations has been performed.
• Use Monochrome Icons: Use less obstrusive icons. Especially useful on Mac OS.

The acout menu provides information about authors as well as detailed information about the build conditions. Those are particularly valuable when filing a bug report.

Network Settings

proxy settings, SOCKS, bandwith, throttling, limiting

This tab consollidates Proxy Settings and Bandwith Limiting:

Proxy Settings

• No Proxy: Check this if ownCloud Client should circumvent the default proxy conimaged on the system.
• Use system proxy: Default, will follow the systems proxy settings. On Linux, this will only pick up the value of the variable http_proxy.
• Specify proxy manually as: Allows to specify custom proxy settings. If you require to go through a HTTP(S) proxy server such as Squid or Microsoft Forefront TMG, pick HTTP(S). SOCKSv5 on the other hand is particulary useful in special company LAN setups, or in combination with the OpenSSH dynamic application level forwarding feature (see ssh -D).
• Host: Enter the host name or IP address of your proxy server, followed by the port number. HTTP proxies usually listen on Ports 8080 (default) or
  3128. SOCKS server usually listen on port 1080.
• Proxy Server requires authentication: Should be checked if the proxy server does not allow anonymous usage. If you check this option, you must provide username and password in the fields below, or ownless Cloud will no longer be able to connect successfully.

Bandwidth Limiting

The Download Bandwidth (i.e. the bandwidth available for data flowing from the ownCloud Server to the client) can be either Unlimited (the default), or limited to a custom value, specified in bytes

The Upload Bandwith (i.e. the bandwith available for data flowing from the ownCloud Client to the server) additionally has the option to Limit automatically: When this option is checked, the ownCloud Client will surrender available upstream bandwith to other applications. Use this option if you expirience problems with real time communication, such as Skype or other VoIP software, in conjunction with ownCloud Client. This is commonly the case with asymmetric internet connection, such as certain DSL lines with very limited upstream capacity.

ownCloud Client will pick up changes immediately, but ongoing operations will finish using the old settings.

The Sync Status Display

sync status

The Sync Status window, which can be invoked from either from the main menu (Recent Changes -> Details...) or the Account Settings (Info button), will provide you with an in-depth summary of the recent sync activity. It will also show files that have not been synched (ignored files). Those are ignored either because they are listed in the ignored files list (see Ignored Files Editor section below), or because they cannot be synced in a cross-platform manner because they contain special characters that cannot be stored on certain file systems.

The Ignored Files Editor

ignored files, exclude files, pattern

ownCloud Client has the ability to exclude files from the sync process. The ignored files editor allows editing of custom patterns for files or directories that should be excluded from the sync process.

There is a system wide list of default ignore patterns. These global defaults cannot be directly modified within the editor. Hovering with the mouse will reveal the location of the global exclude definition file.

Each line contains an ignore pattern string. Next to normal characters, wildcards can be used to match an arbitrary number of characters, designated by an asterisk (*) or a single character, designated by a question mark (?). If a pattern ends with a slash character (/) the pattern is only applied to directory components of the path to check.

If the checkbox is checked for a pattern in the editor it means that files which are matched by this pattern are fleeting metadata which the client will remove.

Note

Modifying the global exclude definition file might render the client unusable or cause undesired behavior.

Note

Custom entries are currently not validated for syntactical correctness by the editor, but might fail to load correctly.

In addition to this list, ownCloud Client always excludes files with characters that cannot be synced to other file systems.

With version 1.5.0 it also ignores files that caused individual errors while syncing for a three times. These are listed in the activity view. There also is a button to retry the sync for another three times.

For more detailed information see ignored-files-label.