
ownCloud External Storage
With ownCloud, you can also leverage storage that already exists; FTP, Swift, S3, Dropbox and more. Administrators can decide to store the most sensitive data on-premises and less sensitive data in the cloud while making all of your files available through a single interface and enabling compliance with your chosen security and governance policies.
To be compatible with as many backend storage systems as possible, ownCloud is designed to store all file metadata in the ownCloud database. This includes information like sharing activity, file IDs and more. For extremely large ownCloud instances, it can be more efficient to hand some of the file handling and metadata storage off to backend storage systems that support, for example, versions or file sharing. As the database is often a bottleneck in extremely large systems, offloading these activities and metadata from the database, performance improves, and the same hardware can scale to support even more users – particularly useful for extremely large instances.
