Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Ask Slashdot: Distributed Online Storage For Families?

Posted by timothy on from the she-can-live-in-my-spare-room dept.

StonyCreekBare writes "What options are available for distributed storage for families? My two brothers, my daughter and her husband, and his mother all have homes in various parts of the country. We use various cloud storage providers to keep our shared data. This has numerous limitations and we are starting to think maybe we can do it better ourselves. We all have decent Internet connections, are all somewhat tech savvy, and think that by leveraging the Internet we can maybe provide for our needs better and at lower cost by buying some hardware and doing it ourselves. How would you go about implementing such a family-oriented, distributed cloud platform? What hardware? What applications, beyond simply the preservation and sharing of family data, (grandkids' photos, home videos, and more) would be good to leverage such a platform? Security Cameras? HTPC? VoIP? Home Automation? Primary requirements are Cheap, Secure, Reliable."

4 of 168 comments (clear)

  1. rsync by khasim · · Score: 5, Interesting

    What applications, beyond simply the preservation and sharing of family data, (grandkids' photos, home videos, and more) would be good to leverage such a platform? Security Cameras? HTPC? VoIP? Home Automation?

    FIRST, you decide on what functionality you want.

    THEN you look at how to achieve that functionality within your budget.

    I'd use rsync as the cheapest means of replicating data between multiple sites. But once you start adding additional functionality requirements that might change.

  2. Re:s3 by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Commercial, propietary and expensive. Stand up a linux box on EC3, with your storage portal of choice.

    ownCloud is open source. If you are a Slashdotter, the time investment should be trivial and the geek/maker factor somewhat exhilarating. 20 bucks a month will blow the doors off of Dropbox pricing for terabyte in the sky. Plus you have a migration/passthrough to Drop, etc.

    --
    "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
    Never been known to fail..."
  3. ownCloud Community edition will do nicely by passionplay · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Clients for every platform. Server distributions for every platform. Mobile clients too. Runs on HTTPS.

    1. 1. Download the community edition from any of the repositories found on https://owncloud.org/
    2. 2. Install using wizard - if you pick SQLite as the database, there is nothing to install for the database - configure to force SSL connections
    3. 3. Setup your router to forward 443 to the box you've set up
    4. 4. Setup a dyndns or similar IP address (or your own domain name) to said IP address.
    5. 5. Install client (desktop or mobile) and start accessing using https://yourserver-or-ip-addre... as the URL

    I've set up something similar for my family - love it. I've also set up something simliar for our enterprise. No complaints about the regular feature set. Just some of the enterprise level things could do with a little more work.

  4. Re:rsync -- look at Unison! by drstevep · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Rsync is a one-way synchronization. Check out Unison; it readily performs a bidirectional merge. You might have to do a little compiling, but hey, isn't that what the Family Geek is for?

    I've been using Unison to sync a pair of Synology boxes that act as my cloud. (One in my office, one at home, each with a RAID-1 array.) I've also gotten it running on a pair of DLink DNS-323 boxes (yes, also RAID-1'ed). The Synology has cloud software; might be a good choice if you want to invest in a cheap small light unobtrusive (Linux) NFS/cloud/music server/etc box.