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:
The settings dialog is split up in three categories: Account Settings, General Settings and Network Settings:
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.
The tab provides several useful options:
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.
This tab consollidates Proxy Settings and Bandwith 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 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.
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.