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Ask Slashdot: Distributed Online Storage For Families?
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."
Amazon with OwnCloud
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
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.
has anyone thought of a simple VPN + NAS solution?
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..."
I think I would have each family member that wants to be part of this shared drive do something like:
- each of you buy the biggest HDD available
- setup a ssh tunnel in the form of a circle between each family member, where Alice connects to Bob, Bob connects to Charlie, and Charlie connects to Alice.
- each family member then rsync's to the next family member over, where they would do a full rsync of the shared disk, but do an rsync --delete on directories that belong to themselves, so if they delete / move files around, it makes the needed corrections on other family members shared disks without wasting space.
If you are running Windows, you can setup a scheduled task to at a time in the middle of the night to launch cygwin, open the ssh tunnel, and rsync away. If it is linux, setup a crontab. Initial coordination would need to be done to get everything right, but then it would be very automatable.
I do not suggest trying to setup a distributed filesystem across the internet. There are many pitfalls. Whereas this solution, your only concern is, 1) is ssh up? 2) did rsync run? 3) is the disk full?
Clients for every platform. Server distributions for every platform. Mobile clients too. Runs on HTTPS.
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.
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.
Online Storage for Families would be great.
A place where you can store the kids in the cloud while you go on holiday. Or something where you can permanently dump the in-laws without hating to store them at home where they take up valuable space. Something that puts them in deep hibernation would be nice, so that the food cost don't run rampant.
Everyone's fairly tech savvy, right?
1.) Figure out a folder structure that makes sure that everyone's data will be put somewhere and won't accidentally be overwritten by someone else's.
2.) Install BitTorrent Sync on something with a hard drive to hold it. Windows box with a USB hard drive? There's a client. OSX? Client. Ubuntu box? Client. DIY FreeNAS with a RAID-1 in a small case? There's a client. Synology or QNAP box? There's a client, albeit with a little command shell necessary. Hell, those $199 Western Digital Personal Cloud drives can run it.
3.) Create those folders on everyone else's machine, e-mailing around the BT Sync folder keys.
4.) Wait for replication of everyone else's data to your drive, and vice versa - everyone will help everyone else get a copy of the data they don't have.
5.) Profit.
Literally every question answered:
How would you go about implementing such a family-oriented, distributed cloud platform?
See above.
What hardware?
Whatever hardware you have lying around, as long as it has the storage capacity you're looking for, and can permanently stay on. A few suggestions are above, but I'm a bit of a FreeNAS guy myself, especially since you can build a half-decent one with a 2TB RAID-1 for about $400 these days. The WD Cloud Drives are about the cheapest and self-contained route to go, so they may be worth considering if you need more than 3 or 4 of them.
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?
Well this is the rather perplexing part, because on the one hand you're asking for decentralized storage, and then you ask why you'd use it (VoIP + decentralized storage?!? wtf??). If you need decentralized storage, one should safely be able to assume that that there's already a reason. Having said that, photos would be my first use case, with disaster recovery being the second - Acronis True Image supports backup to FTP/SMB locations, so as long as you can back up to one of them that way, the rest will distribute.
Primary requirements are Cheap, Secure, Reliable."
Cheap? BT Sync is free; you'd need storage regardless. There's 10,001 topics on Slashdot where "the most reliable form of storage" comes up. "How much do you want to spend" is inherently the question, and "Cheap" indicates "not much"...it also doesn't answer exactly how much storage you'll need. Are you undertaking a massive photo album archiving project, or capturing the last 20 years of home videos? a 2TB drive just might cut it, or not. Are you backing up everyone's laptops? 6TB, MAYBE, and single-drive solutions won't cover it anymore...but are you prepared to start forking over $600 a box, along with a weekend of your time (at least) to the cause? Are you doing a roll-your-own Netflix where everyone will add their own CD/DVD rips to the units and then let Plex Media Server work its magic?
Okay, so I lied...one of the underlying questions have been answered: how to get files to the geographically disparate places in the easiest way possible. BT Sync, at the low, low cost of 'free', resolves this. The questions regarding hardware, and how much storage you will need, and what protocols it will need to support, are wholly dependent on how much data will, in total, have to sit on each device. Answer that question, along with the follow-up of "how safe do you really, REALLY need to be?"and then you can start figuring out numbers to go along with it.
I've been reading Slashdot since 2000, so going on 14 years now. But I'll be stopping next week in support of the boycott, and maybe after that, if the interface catastrophe called "Beta" goes live.
See you on Usenet at comp.misc where old school commenting is happening: no mods, no karma, no whitespace, and no advertising. Just a lot of old geeks with killfiles and a keyboard.
Uck fay Eta bay!
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.