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Ask Slashdot: Easiest Way To Consolidate Household Media?
First time accepted submitter Lordfly writes "The wife and I have started looking to buy a house. In the spirit of that, I've been giving away books, CDs, and DVDs to 'downsize' the pile of crap I'll have to lug around when we do find the right place. That got me thinking about digital files. I'm perfectly okay with giving up (most) books, CDs, and DVD cases. The only music I buy are MP3s anyway, and we stream most everything else if we wanted to watch a show or movie. That being said, I have a desktop, my wife has an old Macbook, we both have tablets, and I also have an Android smartphone. I'd like to set up something on an extra Windows box shoved in a closet that lets me dump every digital file we have (photos, music, ebooks, movies) and then doles it out as necessary to all of our devices. Unfortunately my best computer geek days are likely behind me (photography and cooking have consumed me since), so while I CAN schlep around a command line, I've lost most of my knowledge, so go easy on the 'just apt-get FubarPackageInstaller.gzip and rd -m Arglebargle' stuff. Something easy enough for my wife to use would be a major plus. So: What's the best way to make your own personal 'cloud'?"
...you just have a fileshare. Create two if you want to be fancy. One is read only and is a media horde and the other is a scratch and play area that everyone in the house can use.
Use any tech you want. Use any OS you want.
Just create two samba shares and have at it.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Just buy a NAS box and start copying files. It's easier, less time consuming and less likely to break. Toms hardware has reviews. Get a decent one and it'll stream media to your digital devices without configuration. Suggest a static IP on your router if you have the inclination, but I've not gotten around to it. Similarly, suggest registering it with merge so you get software updates, but probably unnecessary. Other slashdot terms will give a lot more specific advice, but the best buy level NASs already have the compatibility you think you want froma windows box.
Lots of routers are now coming with USB3 connections that let you mount an external hard disk. It's cheaper than a file server and faster than cloud storage. At a $200 price point for an external hard disk and router I think this is a solid bonus. In addition, most external hard disks will sleep after a few minutes when they aren't being used, which is a 'greener' option than a server. You can also have multiple computers adding media to the hard disk at the same time via network to aid in your archival efforts.
I have a small computer set up as a NAS (yes it is running ubuntu server, but any distro would probably work) I run egroupware server on it so I can get email, access files, and have a consolidated calendar (among other things) on all my devices. I tried owncloud, but it was a bit resource intensive.
works for me...
Store your digital media on a server in any way you wish. Set up Plex Media Server, associate it with a MyPlex account, and point it at your media. Share your server with your family member's own MyPlex account, and they'll be able to stream everything from wherever (including using a snazzy new Web Client.) Make sure you set up some offsite backup solution, like Carbonite.
seems ready for what you ask ...
http://owncloud.org/
tom
Most simple - buy a NAS box
Or...
http://www.techsupportalert.com/content/how-i-set-home-file-server-free-review-freenas.htm
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/replace-windows-home-server-great-free-tools/
Better yet set up your own 'home cloud'...
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/101441-create-your-own-personal-media-cloud
Are you going to keep the receipts of purchase around? If not, how are you going to prove all your digital copies are legal? Particularly the ones from physical media that you no longer possess.
I got another Synology DS212J this year. It has a lot of click-to-add packages like photo, audio, media shares. Works with Win/Mac/Lin/I/And (everything I have is Linux/Android).
Great browser based setup/admin, built in RAID, Network Attached Storage. Best home NAS I have used.
Here is their live demo page:
http://www.synology.com/products/dsm_livedemo.php?lang=us
but how much IO can they do??
And most external hard drives do not have backup / raid.
You can get a cheap pc with software raid 1 and 2 HDD's.
Costs money, phones home, and they are desperately trying to monetize it. Avoid Plex.
Good-bye
I'd like to set up something on an extra Windows box shoved in a closet that lets me dump every digital file we have (photos, music, ebooks, movies) and then doles it out as necessary to all of our devices.
It's folks like THIS guy. Their unpatched infected Windows machines sit forgotten in closets all over the world, spraying the malicious packets of Code Red, Nimda, Sober, Blaster, Sasser, etc. despite modern OSs being invulnerable. We call this Internet Background Radiation; This is the reason your modem's "activity" light blinks even if you've just turned it on -- We're being scanned! This is why an unpatched machine connected to the net becomes infected in mere minutes just sitting there... From a raw sampling of unsolicited data coming into an Internet connection I can determine the date at which the sample was taken by the Internet Background Radiation collected, I can "carbon date" the age of the network traffic. Now think: Your ISP bills you for traffic... Are they billing you for all those packets that are dropped at your firewall / router? In a way we are all funding the malicious behavior, we are at least feeding the machines electrons...
The Internet is much like a primordial soup, configurations of malware self assemble from the fertile components of energized silicon. Code Red is infected by Nimda, which alerts modern bot-nets of vulnerable systems ripe for the picking. The cascade of malware produces patterns in the network similar to a neural network, still untrained, not yet aware of itself, so you assume... Yet, as another fertile machine is attached to the net its connection is immediately flooded with enticing electrons, and soon a new infection has formed, as if a neural cell forming a fresh synapse compatible with the type of nodes at the end points.
The malware authors each supply a simple cascading self propagating pattern that grows in complexity over time, but it is YOU and your Windows Media Servers who provided the core components -- the amino acids, so to speak -- that enabled the Sentient Machine Intelligence to emerge! It's YOU I blame for the DEATH OF ALL MANKIND!
I'm too since last week. ;-P
I especially like that the management fronted and packages seem to be pretty much identical from the cheapest 1-bay home user thing to the biggest 36-bay enterprise rack.
Want to set up iSCSI Targets on the cheapest consumer thing? No problem. Want to use the little consumer Photo Album thing on the most expensive enterprise thing? No problem.
The only thing to look for when you want to run "more" than just simple file sharing is to get the ones with a little more RAM and CPU power.
And more environmentally friendly as well. Any halfway decent home NAS will spin down the drives when not in use, and probably use only a few watts while in standby (which will be most of the time, assuming you sleep, go to work, etc.). A desktop may well consume a hundred watts or more in standby. That's a MWh a year, about ~$100 at $0.10/kWh. As such an entry-level home NAS could pay for itself in the first year, a higher-quality one would take a few more.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Hello Lordfly!
I understand you're basically trying to digitalize your library and allow some streaming features to all your digital devices (mac, windows, tablet, phone, etc).
Now there are various options available to you, there are some factors to consider:
* How much data are you looking to store?
* How much time do you want to spend tinkering around with it (looking for a hobby or a solution)?
* Are you looking to stream this data outside of your home and if so, do you have the bandwidth to support the stream?
* How bad would it be to lose your data due to harddisk failure, or a fire?
With all points to consider, based on what you said my guess is that you would be okay to spend a little extra and have the "full solution" in place.
A "NAS" (network attached storage) device sounds like the thing you need here, you can build those yourself, but is rarely much cheaper then grabbing a NAS device from a manufacturer (we're talking maybe 10~50 dollars you'd save here, not counting the hours you'd have to invest to get the software running). A NAS generally is a suite of different solutions and connection methods allowing you to make your storage widely available throughout your home.
Most come prepacked with nice proprietary software packages that offer you all the features right out of the box!
My personal favorite brand on NAS devices is Synology, relatively new but make very nice devices which they frequently update, even on older models.
I have a DS212j at home, with 2 x Western Digital Red 2TB disks in it running in a redundant RAID-1 setting.
http://www.synology.com/products/product.php?product_name=DS212j&lang=enu
Offering a wide selection of connection methods I managed to hook this device up to my PC, media center running XBMC, TV, Home cinema system, laptops and tablet.
Its icing on the cake is its webbased management interface which looks like a windows environment on it's own, very easy with all kinds of navigation windows, external software packages you can click&install and separate interface when using mobile devices or tablets. I can for example now stream my library using the integrated audio-player at work without even having to install any software there. there is also a download tool integrated, All in all it is a lot more then i'd get with a software package as FreeNas for example.
Some are suggesting a XBMC setup which is more of a media-center solution, not as much a storage solution.
I prefer to keep those separate as playing entertainment media and storing data are 2 different purposes each with their own requirements.
I hope this helped you with your choice!
PS. when getting disks, you'd want to go for the more durable series, desktop drives aren't really made for NAS devices and might give issues, my 2 cents, stick with western digital REDs, which are specially made for NAS devices, both cheap and pretty durable.
The tl;dr version:
If you can't admin it, you shouldn't run it. There's a real risk your negligence will cause problems for others.
That said, my advice is: Go buy a NAS that isn't Windows based (most of them aren't). The risks are much lower, and it's easy enough to do basic admin on through a web interface.
They're made for people who aren't interested in all the important details of setting up and maintaining a secure internet-facing file share.
For myself, I've got a computer running iTunes with a big external drive attached for all the media. A couple of Apple TV's scattered around the house make streaming movies shows music and audiobooks a synch. The "Automatically add to itunes" directory is shared, so any other computer can add media to the library for everyone to watch. On top of that, I'd recommend Handbrake for ripping your old DVD's to your library.
The reason i'm pointing out the apple solution is because of the Apple TV's. Admittedly, once I came upon this, I stopped looking for other solutions, so I don't know if there is anything else comparable for streaming media to multiple TV's from a single repository at home, with a simple remote (as opposed to a wireless keyboard or what not... been there, done that, not at all preferable).
If you use any idevices, you can stream from your phone or ipad back up to your TV as well, using the Apple TV. Or from your wifes macbook, supposing she updated to the latest OS.
Commence the Apple bashing now... No, I don't work for them. I'm just pleased with the experience.
Here is what works for me, as well as a few things to keep in mind.
If all your client devices support samba (i.e. they're all computers) then by all means just install Windows on an extra box and set up shared folders and dump your media in there.
You mentioned tablets and smartphones. Those likely do not support samba, so I'd suggest a DLNA server such as Tversity. It works pretty well, but there are some rough edges. What about accessing data to present on TVs, etc?
Another concern is the ongoing cost of powering a system sitting in the closet serving only as a file server. Assuming your old computer will suck 100W 24x7x365, do you really want to pay $100 a year to your electric utility to run it?
If I were you, I would look at some of the appliance solutions such as a USB NAS device that lets you plug Cat5 into one end and multiple USB devices (such as USB HDDs) in the other end to create networked storage. Such devices only use a fraction of the power, plus they're silent and generate no heat. A device like that will pay for itself in power savings in under a year.
Another option would be something like a Boxee Box. That will also let you share two USB hard drives to the network, plus it lets you play just about any file format and stream Netflix, etc to a connected TV. The Boxee Box was recently discontinued in favor of the Boxee TV, so you ought to be able to find one on clearance somewhere for $140-150. Just get a couple 2TB USB drives and connect them. If you need more than 4TB of storage, you're probably better off looking at one of the network hard drive appliances that let you put 4 or 8 drives in anyway.
As far as backup, I wouldn't bother messing with RAID, just buy double the storage you need and make a nightly or weekly differential backup between the two storage sets.
But the REAL question is...with Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon Prime, Vudu, Pandora, SoundCloud, Spotify, etc, do you really need to keep all that media anymore? Why not just pick one or two services to pay a small subscription fee to and let it all live in the cloud? That'll save you from spending money on a computer, storage, software and electricity, and will probably give you a wider variety of media.
"Cloud" is a marketing buzzword, nothing more. People are using the term to describe all kinds of fileservers and appservers now. "Cloud" started out describing the sort of apps that already existed: fileservers like dropbox and what is now iCloud, VPSes with secured CIFS/SMB shares, and appservers like Google Apps and SugarCRM subscriptions . It has since been expanded to include local fileservers, proving how the term really means nothing.
What you want ideally is a fileserver, possibly one running Plex or XBMC to serve up media streams and catalog your media, preferably one built on RAID5 or RAID6 on a hardware-based controller, with a separate array to serve as a backup.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Plex media server on your storage server
Plex client for windows and a new one for metro
Plex client for OS X
Plex client for iOS, android and windows mobile
For everything else, use a browser to get to plex web service on the media server.
Plex will index and fetch metadata for the files, play anything anywhere.
Windows Home Server is a viable option. You can choose the power of the server... from a Dell PE 1900 class to a Atom processor.... or more or less. In addition to homing all of your media (MP3, Vid etc) it can allow remote access to your system(s), perform nightly backups of (windows) based systems. It is expandable (add another multi-TB drive whenever you want to). It can be headless (depending on the home layout, find a nice 'cool' place in the basement). There are also many 3rd party add-on's to enhance your network.
100GB is too small for today's average computer user, IHMO.
With Dropbox, at 500GB you're looking at $499.00/yr which is outrageous. Unlimited storage is $795.00/yr. Now, that's one heavy, yearly "cloud tax", if you ask me.
Is it cheaper to run a home NAS with ZFS support, if you're doing it for 4 years? Yes.OTOH, the problem is, home solutions require security maintenance. You might wanna factor that in, but I still think they have outrageous prices.
Rapidshare is much cheaper, but they create an md5 hash for each of your files. They say they don't check the user's files, but if they get a court injunction, all they have to do is hunt down all the files with the same md5 hash, if they're looking for pirated material, and then it's goodbye your account. And I pretty much doubt there is a human out there who hasn't at least one pirated file (even unknowingly possessing it). So that single file might jeopardize your whole back-up plan. At least they come clean on their policies. Others, I'm not sure what they'll do (e.g., Google Drive).
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
For a home user who is probably going to grow the system (rather than just add new systems or depreciate and replace like a company might) this seems like a pretty key feature.
Unraid is also pretty great about managing data and shares--makes it super easy for someone who doesn't want ot worry about it. A single parity disk and no striping means you can eat a single disk loss, and since the drives don't have to match, you can build it with a bunch of different brand drives from different systems which makes a multiple disk loss in a short time span less likely. Also, it fully supports spinning down the individual disks in an array that are not in use. Streaming a movie will only require a single disk to be spinning in a 5 drive array.
And really...if you are not a typical /. nerd...you are not going to watch that video.
Bottles.
I have an FS, which I think is similar to the 5N.
http://www.drobo.com/products/professionals/drobo-5n/index.php
That initial cost is quite the leap of faith, but dually redundant mismatched drives that I can upgrade seamlessly at my leisure (and if drives ever get cheap again)? Done.
And yes, you could build your own network of rsync shares more cheaply, and performance is frankly unspectacular (may be my crusty 100M network.) But it's a ten minute setup for a virtually inexhaustible file share that you don't ever have to worry about. Sounds about right for our tech-wary OP.
ceci n'est pas un sig.
I too have been running this for years and years now for pretty much all of the reasons mentioned. Recently I've begun having some REAL fun and have virtualized unRAID on an ESX host and am now able to run a bunch of other VMs too. I'm fiddling around with NAS4Free as a second NAS package to store the VMs and to create a cache drive for unRAID. Let me tell you, the software setup for unRAID is child's play compared to some of the fun I'm having trying to setup this other package. It's certainly doable and it can do ZFS, ISCSI, and other things but no way in hell would I recommend it for someone who just wanted to load up some software and quickly go. unRAID really does make things very easy and while I'm having a blast with my more complex setup it's overkill for most folks even geeks like myself.
I wouldn't just do a share on a Windows or Linux machine for sure, I wouldn't do a complex ZFS thing with even more complex expansion, but unRAID? Oh heck yes - I have even given away a couple of these boxes as Christmas gifts they're so easy to maintain!
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