NAS/Personal Cloud?

[IC_Raptor - Beowulf]

Looking into a personal cloud (like dropbox or google drive) and am looking into all the different hardware used such as WD's lineup for the "My Cloud" -- is there a difference between a NAS and a Personal Cloud?

 

Thanks for even looking at this. 

 

~Raptor o7

[Guest]

How much storage do you need?

[Simon771]

I'm using WD MyCloud 4TB, but not for that reason that you want.

It can be used for personal cloud like you want it.

 

But something to keep in mind: You need to have good internet connection at your home or wherever you will plug in this device. 100/100 Mbps would be ideal if you ask me.

I have 100/20, and when I was uploading things from my phone to wd cloud, there wasn't any problem since I was able to upload things at around 10MB/s.

 

But when you try to download something ... well with my 20Mbps upload link at home, that meant about 2MB/s download speed. Not that bad, but I'm the kind of user who want to have everything on 10Gbps fiber, so that's just not good enough for me

 

Also, that application from WD isn't as appealing to me as using Dropbox. I'm still using dropbox, and I win't switch to anything else anytime soon.

[Marinatall_Ironside]

Welcome to the forums.

 

Depending on what contents you want to store through the cloud, you could be looking at as little as 3-4TB, to as much as 40TB (but that's ridiculous unless you plan on accessing videos or 4K raw pictures or something). So that's something you can figure out, and it's always nice to ask us.

 

To access that storage via cloud, you'll need a good internet connection to access it wherever it'll be hooked up to. This is achievable at home, but because I have no experience with using a NAS and accessing things over the internet, I'm not sure if you can access that stuff elsewhere, provided that the NAS is hooked up prior.

 

Like @Simon771 said, I use Google Drive (while he uses Dropbox) to store/access my stuff. And most of that stuff is documents I've written myself.

[jkirkcaldy]

A lot of NAS devices will have some sort of option to access your data across the internet some are better than others. My only experience with a 'proper' NAS device was a QNAP system and the way that worked was it went through QNAP servers then to your device so they didn't really want people hammering the connection. (I'm sure that there was other ways of setting this up but it was a production device in a video editing environment so even connecting it to the internet so I could download individual clips was not really ideal.)

 

If you are going DIY or if you are looking at the more expensive NAS units from QNAP/Synology etc. The ones with proper cpus and a decent amount of RAM, (the QNAP we were using was an i7 with 16GB RAM) then you could look into an Ubuntu VM running nextcloud. 

 

Nextcloud is a free and open source application that you host yourself, it works much like dropbox and google drive with a web interface that you can download and look through your files and even offers mobile and desktop clients to automatically sync your documents across different devices. You can also scale this from whatever you have lying around to multiple TB depending on your needs. 

 

For this to work you will need a domain name, a linux VM, a lot of patience and some general idea of how to get around Ubuntu. This guide from Digital Ocean is pretty good for getting you started. https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-and-configure-nextcloud-on-ubuntu-16-04

 

You will also probably want to be running your own DNS server inside your network. This can be a pretty complicated install but if you are looking for a weekend project then look into it. It's pretty fun and interesting and pretty rewarding when it all works properly. 

 

A fast internet connection is recommended but it depends on what you're using your cloud for. If you are using it to store massive video files you are going to need a good connection. If you are just storing word docs and backing up your pictures from your phone, you won't need too much. (Especially as when you are uploading away from home you are using your download connection for the server and you will be limited by the upload connection of your local internet.) 

[IC_Raptor - Beowulf]

I got one of those free promotions for "100 GB of google drive for 2 years" and it's almost expired after the allotted time I was given, considering I'd rather use a NAS with a 1TB HDD as a cloud service. I had considered the "MyCloud" from WD and the fact that my dad also wants to use more storage for cloud (i.e. drive/dropbox) it would be a simpler solution. Glad to get feedback.

[Salacious B Crum]

So you're not concerned about redundancy just storage? I have an apple time machine that is 3TB but just finished an unRAID server from my old pre-built currently with 9TB that can be accessed from anywhere provided you set up a VPN works like a charm the nice thing is once you set it up its very expandable as time goes - where as a Cloud drive is just that a drive that when fails so goes your data. Think you could also setup windows storage spaces as a cloud type of storage on your network