Ask Slashdot: Building a Personal FOSS Cloud?

An anonymous reader writes "Cloud-based personal data management is pretty cool... if you don't mind entrusting the entirety of your personal data to a gigantic corporation. Apart from the risks of their doing unseemly things with your data, also the security of your data is entirely in their unreliable hands. So, is it possible to build my own personal data repository, where for example, I can store my contacts and calendars to sync to multiple devices? This could be hosted on any third party hosting service assuming also that all of my data was encrypted at the data level. So even if the host wanted to look at my data, all they'd see is 1s and 0s. What are the options for the tinfoil hat wearing FOSS folks that want to participate in the cloud age?"

Comments

Found it when googling for dropbox alternatives

[BagOBones]

http://owncloud.org/

- Calendar
- Contacts
- dropbox like storage

Re:Found it when googling for dropbox alternatives

[Anonymous Coward]

The actual ownCloud application that you setup on your server doesn't have a reference to googleapis. I just checked on my installation.

For those wondering, the project website links to the jQuery library hosted on Google's server so they don't have to host it themselves.

Re:Found it when googling for dropbox alternatives

[icebraining]

For those wondering, the project website links to the jQuery library hosted on Google's server so they don't have to host it themselves.

And more importantly, so that we don't have to be constantly re-download the same file, since we probably already have Google's copy cached.

We're working on it

[wurp]

https://github.com/wurp/Friendly-Backup

It works now, with some bugs. The first targeted usecase is distributed backup.

However, it can store arbitrary read-only content-addressed data as well as signed labels that point point to a particular piece of CBA data to emulate mutable data.

I have a whole slew of plans beyond backup for it, but backup seemed like the thing everyone needs and would most like to have for free on a federated data store.

Freedombox

[Qubit]

slashdot ate my last comment, so just check out the link

SparkleShare

[SpzToid]

Try the free open-source SparkleShare software and roll your your own cloud 100%. That would trump any cloud provider option if this is your concern, since all the disks and PCs are under your ownership and control.

SparkleShare is essentially a DropBox clone in terms of a GUI, which extends to recovering older versions with a right-click. It looks like DropBox, and it works like DropBox too. But it is just a scripted GIT environment. In fact if you already have a GIT Repo hosted on a server (or service) somewhere, SparkleShare is easily configured to wrk with it. Here's how you start from scratch, assuming you already have PGP keys shared with the server:

At the server, create a new, empty GIT repository:
git init --bare NEWREPOSITORY.git
At the workstation:

Normally, you might use something like the following commands to work with GIT. (these are not necessary if you use SparkleShare)

git clone ssh://user@example.com:port/home/user/NEWREPOSITORY.git
cd NEWREPOSITORY.git
git clone ssh://user@example.com:port/home/user/NEWREPOSITORY.git
The SparkleShare config:

Add Hosted Project...

Address:

ssh://user@example.com:port

Remote Path: /home/user/NEWREPOSITORY.git

This document explains how to add a layer of encryption, (which also works to secure services like DropBox btw: https://github.com/hbons/SparkleShare/wiki/Encrypting-your-files-before-transfer

Re:cloud vs server

[AuMatar]

Servers are web 1.0. Cloud is web 3.0. Much buzzier and hipper.