[MrMcqueen]

Hello Bhpians , this is my first long post here in Team-Bhp, after being an avid reader for almost 10 years i have recently received the keys to be a member of this elite forum and i thank team-bhp team for accepting my application.

My background. I am an accountant by profession, an auto-motive enthusiast and a bit tech savvy guy having very basic understanding of how tech works, this article shows my level understanding (which is very low) on the project in hand. So, members who are experts in this felid i am apologizing beforehand for doing the same in a very basic way.

Now coming to the work in hand, we now live in a world were data has become the new oil, the new gold and the new weapon for nations and has become assets for individuals, and this data (photos, videos etc...) In hand is increasing day by day. My personal data itself is around 1.9 TB and counting. Also the days of getting our marriage photos and videos on Albums, VHS, CD/DVD/Blu-ray are numbered (My marriage data was given to us on an hard drive). And storing them in an external hard drive is not prudent, i have lost 340 GB of data recently hoping to recover them through some recovery services.

The ideal scenario is to have our data in the cloud, companies like google, Microsoft are providing cloud storage services but are very expensive Rs.6500/Yr for 2TB. And I am unable to trust these companies who feed on our data for their revenue. So the next best thing is NAS (Network Attached Storages), companies like Synology are providing these hardware but are very costly. So decided to build one.

Ideal scenario for data to be safe is 3-2-1 ie.. Three copies, in two different media and one copy kept offsite. But my end goal is to have three copies (in same media) in two places, two copies with me and another copy in the server at my native place.

For the first step I am staring with a single NAS capable to store the data and can automatically sync with my mobile and able to access from anywhere.

Requirements
1.Any old windows PC Laptop/desktop.
2.Hard drive for storage.
3.Any desk application for remote access.
4.Mi File manager app for browsing the shared folder.
5.Tailscale application (on mobile and PC) for access to your server from anywhere around the world.
6.Foldersync app on mobile to schedule the synchronization of data between mobile and NAS.

My setup
An old desktop computer from HP , model HP-Compaq DC7900 Small form factor ,bought for around Rs 3500. A 1TB hard drive extracted from an old laptop.
Specifications of the device
Intel Core 2 Duo CPU @2.93 GHz.
4 GB DDR 2 RAM.
160 GB boot drive.
1 TB HDD for storage.

We need one boot drive and one storage drive, connect both hard drives to the PC with SATA connector and connect the power cable for the same.

Steps for configuring NAS

Step 1: Create a Microsoft account and login using this credentials in the old PC that you want to convert to server.
Settings> Accounts> Emails and accounts > Login to your Microsoft account.



Step 2 : Setup network share for the folder you want to be as your cloud destination.
Right Click on your NAS folder/Drive

Properties> Sharing (tab) > Advanced sharing > tick Share this folder> permissions >full control.



Step 3 : Reserve an Local IP address for your server.
Go to your router settings usually it is 192.168.1.1 or 192.168.1.0 (type in your browser and login).
Advanced Setup>LAN Setup> DHCP reservation.
Type your server mac address and reserve any IP address within the range available.



This step may be different for different routers please refer your manual/web for clarification.

Step 4: Create a tailscale account, signup here www.tailscale.com

Step 5: Download and install Tailscale and any desk application
Both can be googled and downloaded.

Step 6 :
Login to your tailscale application using your credentials on the server.




Step 7
Go to tailscale dashboard by logging in with your account and you can find your server.



Note down your IP address here it is 100.123.220.25.

Step 8:
Install Foldersync and tailscale applications on your android device, login to your tailscale application using your credentials and press active on the top left corner.



Step 9:
Configure sync in the foldersync application.
Add account> SMB>SMB1
Give sever address from tailscale dashboard, and Microsoft credentials and press test.



Step 10 :
Create a share by selecting source (from your mobile) to target (your cloud folder).





That’s it your own cloud storage is ready and you can schedule the sync and enjoy your cloud storage.

Kindly note that tailscale is a VPN application that helps you to connect to your home network from outside and this app should be active to connect to your server.
It can also be your VPN server if you use exit node function.
Now you have two IP address for the server for example in my case 192.168.1.8 when you are trying to connect to server when you are on same network and 100.123.220.25 for when you are trying to connect from outside of your home network,so use address accordingly.
I have not explained about anydesk but you can configure the same for unattended access and have a control of your computer for some other works.
Mi file manager can be used to browse your data remotely and can be configured accordingly.
I understand that there may be some elegant solutions to achieve the same like TrueNAS , but those are way ahead technically that I can handle.
Thank you all for reading and thank you team-bhp for the membership.

My next upgrade would be addition of mSATA SSD as a boot drive and keep two 2TB hard drives on mirror mode.

This is my current setup.




PS: My English proficiency is not that great my apologies for any grammatical mistakes.

[Pixeldynamic]

Instead of Mi file explorer app, you can try Solid Explorer as well. It's paid but it costs one time 20 rupees on some days. It's incredibly feature rich and fast. You can do stuff like transfer files between Google Drive and your NAS. This is great if you are wary of Chinese apps.

[bajoseph04]

We'll excited to see your post on personal cloud storage especially in team-bhp¡ I too have my personal cloud storage that has functionalities onpar or above Google drive or one drive. May be I'll write a separate post on it later if m allowed to do so. But to summarise, I use nextcloud on a raspberry Pi 4B (4gb ram) running Ubuntu server. Nextcloud is open source and free. I also have my personal domain and a static IP. So the cloud storage can be accessed and synced from any part of the world. Nextcloud has many more functionalities like 'nextcloud talk' messaging, etc and it's capabilities are limitless if you run it on a powerful hardware. But for personal cloud, a raspberry Pi is the ideal solution considering its low power consumption.

[Sebring]

I have the WD MyCloud 6TB. The new one is 8TB

[venkat_partha]

Originally Posted by bajoseph04

We'll excited to see your post on personal cloud storage especially in team-bhp¡ I too have my personal cloud storage that has functionalities onpar or above Google drive or one drive. May be I'll write a separate post on it later if m allowed to do so. But to summarise, I use nextcloud on a raspberry Pi 4B (4gb ram) running Ubuntu server. Nextcloud is open source and free. I also have my personal domain and a static IP. So the cloud storage can be accessed and synced from any part of the world. Nextcloud has many more functionalities like 'nextcloud talk' messaging, etc and it's capabilities are limitless if you run it on a powerful hardware. But for personal cloud, a raspberry Pi is the ideal solution considering its low power consumption.

Yep, Next Cloud on a raspberry pi is a wonderful solution to keeping your content @ home. Attach a 2TB USB HDD, and you have all the space that you need.

Running NextCloud Hub 7 (28.0.3) on a RPi4 with 2TB Toshiba USB HDD (unpowered).

Works like a charm. Can share resources that will enable you to install NextCloud from scratch, if you want to try.

[Jeroen]

Thanks for this informative post.

What do you do for backups?

Jeroen

[Light]

@MrMcqueen Thank you for sharing this with us, this popped up in my news feed!
Managing data integrity and availability is sort of my bread and butter so I will share a few of my thoughts.

Complexity is the bane of data management and must be whittled down whenever possible.

For multi-device file synchronization with minimal setup, you could consider the free and open source Syncthing project.
This would cut down requirements 4, 5, and 6.

Each of the Syncthing nodes/devices should have similar amounts of storage but it prevents the pitfalls of centralized data storage and failures.

For example, you could install a 2-4 TB drive on two of your machines and run Syncthing on it for 2 local copies and repurpose the current centralized machine as a third node (and an offsite backup) at your ancestral home.

Syncthing has file versioning to protect you from accidental deletions or ransomware.
The downside is it does not currently have data integrity checks like a RAID volume as the project relies on the filesystem to handle that. But this is hardly a problem when there would be other issues related to a failing drive and if you find any corruption (for example an image not loading or appearing corrupted on one device) there are two other copies from which to restore.

Things like RAID or its ZFS/Btrfs equivalents do not have much practical use for home users other than for its data integrity features, in business uses it additionally serves to increase availability. You could also write a simple script to hash all the files once a month and check for integrity issues that way without having to resort to RAID.

As you're quite an intelligent person (honestly your stack is quite impressive in its complexity notwithstanding future plans to add mirroring/RAID, etc.) the future progression of your tech skills should focus on learning the basics of GNU/Linux (once you get past the mental blocker of using CLIs I promise it is much simpler than managing Windows) as that would enable you to try out Btrfs/ZFS and their awesome snapshot capabilities, incremental snapshot backups, data integrity checks, built-in volume management (RAID), etc.

This would also save a lot of money into the future as your current PC is not compatible with Windows 11 and Windows 10 would be EOL in 2025. Btrfs has the advantage of mixing drive sizes for RAID as well. As an example I have 1x4TB, 1x2TB, and 2x1TB drives as a RAID 1 volume with 2TB usable space for storing unimportant data with no backups while still providing some protection against drive failures.

[aspire]

I have a WD mycloud mirror gen 2, upgraded to total capacity of 12 tb, I use Aomei backupper paid software to automatically take backups from my laptop. Planning to buy a desktop and a Synology NAS as well.

[Light]

Originally Posted by venkat_partha

Yep, Next Cloud on a raspberry pi is a wonderful solution to keeping your content @ home. Attach a 2TB USB HDD, and you have all the space that you need.

Running NextCloud Hub 7 (28.0.3) on a RPi4 with 2TB Toshiba USB HDD (unpowered).

Works like a charm. Can share resources that will enable you to install NextCloud from scratch, if you want to try.

Looks like the RPi has grown up being a able to handle a 2T drive without a powered USB hub. It has been a while since I've used them, have a few RPi 2/2Bs and Zeros lying around somewhere!

Curious, what's your backup/restore strategy? I use borgmatic (borg) for all offsite backups on my Linux machines and btrfs snapshots with baksnapper for local backups.

Originally Posted by Sebring

I have the WD MyCloud 6TB. The new one is 8TB

Interesting NAS though on the pricier end for what it offers. Do these have RAID redundancy or some sort of remote backup in place? The first review I spotted on Amazon is of a customer that lost their data and WD support apparently told him "drive dead, purchase new".

[LordSharan]

Hi, This is commendable effort and not to steal your thunder, this is exactly not a cloud storage, rather merely a way to backup data from multiple devices online to a single place.

Where would your system take a serious beating:

a. what if a HDD in your set up fails? You do have mirroring, but effectively you are using half the space that you could. For your use case, RAID5 or RAID6 would probably be a better choice. you do not have a system that offers 4 9's or 5 9's of availability. E.g. how long will your power supply last if the main supply goes away? have you built redundacies at every level? starting with power supply, HDD's in RAID array, different network connections?
b. what if there's an act of god and your system gets destroyed beyond repair? is there a back up at a different geographical location?

Good things that I noticed - mirroring of HDD's, SSD's used which have lower failure rate than mech SATA or SAS drives and have better throughput, using VPN to protect privacy.

Having worked in this field for sometime, I'd still recommend you go for Google Drive or Microsoft's one drive, available at a dirt cheap price right now, and it offers you long lasting data protection. You can have clients (drive/one drive) running on devices that you operate. The rate at which enterprise and personal cloud offerings are evolving, I see no incentive to re-invent the wheel, and use what is being offered.

[Rehaan]

Cross-linking to a similar thread by tilt (Building a cheap, slow & less powerful Home NAS (network attached storage))

[maverick029]

Why not look at aws s3? Provides cheap enough solution and you can encrypt data to keep it safe along with multi zone replication. Sorry to say while your setup is good its not cloud.

[Light]

Originally Posted by Light

Btrfs has the advantage of mixing drive sizes for RAID as well. As an example I have 1x4TB, 1x2TB, and 2x1TB drives as a RAID 1 volume with 2TB usable space for storing unimportant data with no backups while still providing some protection against drive failures.

Correction: 4 TB usable space.

Originally Posted by LordSharan

Having worked in this field for sometime, I'd still recommend you go for Google Drive or Microsoft's one drive, available at a dirt cheap price right now, and it offers you long lasting data protection. You can have clients (drive/one drive) running on devices that you operate. The rate at which enterprise and personal cloud offerings are evolving, I see no incentive to re-invent the wheel, and use what is being offered.

I second this, backup programs like borg and restic does client side encryption so no worries about the target being untrustworthy.

Originally Posted by maverick029

Why not look at aws s3? Provides cheap enough solution and you can encrypt data to keep it safe along with multi zone replication. Sorry to say while your setup is good its not cloud.

Doesn't S3 have steep egress fees? IIRC, they were thinking about removing those for EU due to GDPR. It also adds another layer of complexity for OP's use case, i.e., converting file storage to object storage and back.

[MrMcqueen]

Jeroen, currently my backups are few external hard drives and praying to god that they do not fail. This is my baby steps in creating a home storage server. My end goal is to have two servers and one server has two copies and another server will have a backup and both servers will be in sync automatically.

[maverick029]

Originally Posted by Light

Doesn't S3 have steep egress fees? IIRC, they were thinking about removing those for EU due to GDPR. It also adds another layer of complexity for OP's use case, i.e., converting file storage to object storage and back.

Nope egress fees is steep if you use glacier and pull data from archive multiple times. Files are stored as is object storage is a fancy word, there is no conversion necessary, you can use files as is and it can sync with desktop as well. About the gdpr thing i am not aware of recent changes, but to comply with gdpr aws has to store eu region data within eu itself. S3 usage is pretty simple similar to google drive and you can manage cost with their calculator easily. If OP can dabble in all that installation and setup this is much simpler.