Access control
Prevent unauthorised parties from dipping their toe in your data pool.
One disadvantage of making data omnipresent is that you must take extra precautions to ensure that it’s only available to the intended audience. The solutions on test here all take somewhat similar approaches to lock access to the shared data. The only exceptions are Syncthing and SparkleShare. Because they are both primarily used to keep folders across machines in sync, they don’t offer the same access control features that you’ll find on other solutions. As such, the only means for restricting the flow of data in these two services is the ability to choose the computers with which you wish to share a particular folder. On the other hand, the other three solutions offer several options to secure your shares. All three enable you to passwordprotect a share and also set an auto-expiration for the link, either by date or after a specified number of downloads. With Pydio, you can also establish the access permissions for the shares and share complete folders either as independent workspaces or as a public link. Seafile supports a role-based feature control mechanism. As the administrator you can define roles in Seafile and specify the functions a role can perform. For example, guest role can be prevented from deleting libraries.
Nextcloud also makes it possible for you share public links as read-only or with editing capabilities. There’s also a File Access control plugin that you can use to define groups of rules, which will then be matched with a file request. So for example, you can define a rule that prevents uploads from users in the students group of files larger than 100MB.