In house cloud storage

[RageValley]

I'm becoming increasingly concerned that I am not doing enough to keep my data backed up so have been looking at some in-house / personal cloud storage.

I would previously use my gaming/HTPC to copy files but as of late spending less time gaming and watching TV shows the HTPC is never switched on it's becoming more and more of a chore keeping things backed up. I would definitely benefit from having a centralised device I can throw everything on.

I am looking for something that;
- That can be left on and forgotten about, no loud fans or over heating.
- Is small, 2 drives max, unless it's really compact
- Is cloud enabled, allowing me to access files away from home
- Is relatively fast - I don't want to send thousands on the most powerful device that ever was, but something that is powerful enough to comfortable handle;
- Downloading torrents
- Streaming media (Plex server)
- Is able to backup a PC and a Mac


Finally, something that has some sort of mobile backup, something basic like installing iOS app and manually/automatically backing up photo library. One major concern I have now is that my partner is taking a lot of photos and videos of our children but we're not backing them up properly.. she doesn't have or use a PC so we're relying on Apples cloud photo library, I would love to give her a way she can backup stuff and remove them from her phone but still view them from the app and feel comfortable that we have a local in-house copy.

Any suggestions? Thanks

 

[nsafreak]

Well you could build your own NAS and use one of several solutions insofar as the OS to do what you want but your needs aren't exotic and personally I typically only recommend that road if you have spare parts lying around. This Synology NAS at $250 + cost of hard drives should fit the bill just fine.

 

[JeffMD]

I can couch for the WD cloud drive, very fast speeds which would be great for backing up.

 

[Red Squirrel]

If you want something that you can depend on for a long time, look at setting up a 24 bay or similar machine with Linux and do either ZFS or mdadm raid. Then use NFS and/or Samba for the shares. This way you're not relying on proprietary tech that might stop working or stop being supported years down the line. By going with a large chassis it also gives you lot of room for expansion.

I personally use mdadm raid and got 3 raid arrays on my Supermicro 24 bay chassis. One of the arrays is one of my first ones that is a raid 5 with 8 1TB drives, it got moved from my old server into another server, and is now in the storage server. Mdadm is nice like that you can just move drives to a totally different machine and start the array right back up. The array was originally created in like 2008. I think most of the drives, if all, have been replaced at least once, with zero down time to data availability.

Now days I do raid 10's though. Eventually I'll retire that array to free up the slots for bigger drives.

As far as more specific software to play with, there's one called Owncloud that looks interesting. I never played with it myself though. For remote access you could setup Open VPN. There is a client for Android, possibly for Apple too.

 

[RageValley]

Well you could build your own NAS and use one of several solutions insofar as the OS to do what you want but your needs aren't exotic and personally I typically only recommend that road if you have spare parts lying around. This Synology NAS at $250 + cost of hard drives should fit the bill just fine.

Thanks for the suggestion, I looked deeper into Synology and ended up at their competition QNAP... I love the idea of the virtualisation containers they offer but looks like it's going to cost me more than i'd hoped.

So far i've settled on: QNAP TS-253A-4G -- Haven't quite made up my mind.

If you want something that you can depend on for a long time, look at setting up a 24 bay or similar machine with Linux and do either ZFS or mdadm raid. Then use NFS and/or Samba for the shares. This way you're not relying on proprietary tech that might stop working or stop being supported years down the line. By going with a large chassis it also gives you lot of room for expansion.

I personally use mdadm raid and got 3 raid arrays on my Supermicro 24 bay chassis. One of the arrays is one of my first ones that is a raid 5 with 8 1TB drives, it got moved from my old server into another server, and is now in the storage server. Mdadm is nice like that you can just move drives to a totally different machine and start the array right back up. The array was originally created in like 2008. I think most of the drives, if all, have been replaced at least once, with zero down time to data availability.

Now days I do raid 10's though. Eventually I'll retire that array to free up the slots for bigger drives.

As far as more specific software to play with, there's one called Owncloud that looks interesting. I never played with it myself though. For remote access you could setup Open VPN. There is a client for Android, possibly for Apple too.

It's tempting but a big expensive project. I'm wanting to lower power consumption of my HTPC, doing this wouldn't really fix my problem.