Creating my own cloud

[dykesy61]

Hi
I am running the following system on my asus vivomini
Mint 20.1 on an i3 (7100) with 8GB RAM

I want to create a home cloud that I can keep my photos and music on
and I want to be able to share these across the house!
I can see I could just buy a synology cloud storage solution but wondered about doing it myself
what would you say to me?
what are the best ways to do this?

thanks

dykesy61

[JoeFootball]

what would you say to me?

I would ask for clarity on what you're really looking for. Are you looking for true "cloud" server, which could be accessible anywhere there's internet connectivity, inside and outside your home? Or are you merely looking for an internal server, which would only be accessible within your home network?

Regardless, for a true cloud solution, I'd suggest Nextcloud, and for an internal NAS, I'd suggest OpenMediaVault.

[dykesy61]

thanks
not really looking for a full cloud situation
internal would be fine

so do you think it is worthwhile to get a bespoke NAS like Synology supply or should I use another mini pc to set up using openmediavault?
how easy is it to set up and so on?

thanks for your help

[JoeFootball]

so do you think it is worthwhile to get a bespoke NAS like Synology supply or should I use another mini pc to set up using openmediavault?
how easy is it to set up and so on?

I suppose it depends on your level of effort that you're looking to invest.

Speaking for myself, I setup OpenMediaVault server on an old PC several years ago. I don't remember the details, but I do recall that they had decent documentation, and there were YouTube videos people had made as well. I don't think it was an overwhelming experience, but it did require me to learn new things.

[rene]

The important thing is having an always-on system, and if you don't currently you might as well use/buy a NAS to be said system: they tend to be small Linux computers anyway, customized for your very purpose. If you do already have an always-on system on your network something like Joe's advised OpenMediaVault is quite nice should you want to in fact get serious but simply exporting an NFS or CIFS share from a general Linux distribution on it might be all you'd in fact care for.

A commercial NAS, and Synology's tend to be good, is quite nice, especially in the hardware sense of (for a home NAS normally but look for that in reviews) being silent and energy efficient and in the software sense of being customized and preconfigured for your purpose. I've a couple of NASes on my local network and would not want to build my own custom solution: I strive to have as many appliances as possible be as little computer as possible lest they'd waste as much of my time as the ones that are computers do.

[dykesy61]

thank you both
really helpful
cheers
dykesy61

[JoeFootball]

thank you both

You're welcome. If interested, here's the OMV documentation to help you decide.

[AZgl1800]

MEGA Cloud is free up to a point, roughly 50gB of data

I have some stuff on it.

https://mega.nz/

the drawback, is access to the web, which is true for any cloud server.

[MartyMint]

You could setup Samba on the device you want to host the files.