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Ask Slashdot: Building a Personal FOSS Cloud?

Posted by timothy on from the and-you-will-always-have-shade dept.

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?"

4 of 189 comments (clear)

  1. cloud vs server by O('_')O_Bush · · Score: 4, Interesting

    At what point does this involve a cloud? Renting a server(providing ftp, for example) is easy, and doesn't require anything from the "cloud age".

    Also, building a server or buying one secondhand is cheap, if you want to DIY.

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    1. Re:cloud vs server by ganjadude · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I was wondering the same, when I first read the headline I had visions of friends setting up partitions on each others hard drives and do cloud storage between mom,dad,sister,brother,grandparents,friends

      redundancy for family photos for instance on all family computers for instance. obviously private storage as well. the odds of all computers going down at once in multiple locations is highly unlikely. p

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  2. Re:Found it when googling for dropbox alternatives by SomePgmr · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Or use any of the usual storage services that provide a client to maintain a sync'd mount point, and just secure the contents. Jungledisk will do this for you for Amazon or Rackspace backed storage. Google Drive, Dropbox, etc. can be used with your own encryption mechanism.

    For bonus redundancy, sync the local cache to an external USB drive so you don't get caught with your pants down if one of those services botches your remote store.

  3. I have the above, and it's not a cloud by thegarbz · · Score: 4, Interesting

    You want the above? That's easy. Access to email from anywhere, access to my contacts and my calendar, how about access to all my files? Yep got that. Though it doesn't have a fancy name like "cloud". If I were into marketing I'd call it a cloud, but right now I'll stick to calling it an "internet facing linux machine"

    Yeah it's not as exciting, but it does everything the so called cloud has done and it has done it for many years before this mythical cloud has existed. My phone sees the same set of files and emails as my home desktop PC, and there's a web interface to access all the above too.

    Seriously just google "Linux Groupware" and maybe "Linux Web Fileserver" and you'll have everything that the cloud has.