Question about servers 'n stuff

[Fluffybakon]

Hey Guys,

 

I've got a question. I'm looking for an easy way to share large files with a group of 4 people. By large, i mean large. Both UE4 files and the exports, each being above 5gb, along with videos, photos, and other files required for this project. I was wondering, having never done this sort of thing before, what the best option would be. The ones that i've heard of are as follows: Renting a server, or building a custom one. I've considered building something, because A: i love building and B: it seems cheaper than renting a server for the average rates of around 60$ a month, and C: If i need more storage in the future, i just gotta buy a new drive.

 

Thanks a lot in advance

 

-Lukas

[Crunchy Dragon]

How widespread are you? You can do file sharing if you set up a Homegroup in Windows without ever really needing a server/NAS if you're all on the same network.

 

I personally would choose to build a server in your position, I too love to build computers...

[Fluffybakon]

1 minute ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

How widespread are you? You can do file sharing if you set up a Homegroup in Windows without ever really needing a server/NAS if you're all on the same network.

 

I personally would choose to build a server in your position, I too love to build computers...

3 of us are in the same country, and all on the same continent, so unfortunately a cheap solution like what you suggested is not going to work

[factorialandha]

If you build something, you hit the problem that "large" files will take a long time for someone to access / download, so it depends on your access methods, if you effectively want your own drop box, 

 

id probably recommend a shared google drive, or drop box.

 

Hosting your own will be terrible unless you have super fast internet access (upload and download) 

 

If it literally is just file sharing like i mentioned above, you would be much better paying for something like drop box or google drive. or another cloud hosted file sharing solution which will have much much more bandwidth than you do for allowing people to download those files.

 

$20 a year for 100GB dropbox much more cost effective than building something and having remote users with slow ass upload / download to the content.

[manikyath]

if syncing times arent a big worry, onedrive does a surprisingly good job, and with office365 proplus you get 1TB per user.

 

past that, if one of you has a fast internet connection with high enough download limit, nothing's really stopping you from building a storage server and tossing FTP on it (for security reasons, on a different port than standard) that the others can connect to. beyond any other form of file sharing, ofcourse.

 

EDIT: by the way, with building your own stuff and self-hosting, dont forget to calculate in power cost into the pricetag.

[factorialandha]

11 minutes ago, manikyath said:

if syncing times arent a big worry, onedrive does a surprisingly good job, and with office365 proplus you get 1TB per user.

 

past that, if one of you has a fast internet connection with high enough download limit, nothing's really stopping you from building a storage server and tossing FTP on it (for security reasons, on a different port than standard) that the others can connect to. beyond any other form of file sharing, ofcourse.

 

EDIT: by the way, with building your own stuff and self-hosting, dont forget to calculate in power cost into the pricetag.

agreed, i personally feel building your own "file server" for this purpose, is probably going to cost you way more than it would to just have a shared google drive or folder. 

 

1TB google Drive = $120 a year

 

1TB File server (based on spec) id say a half decent one, at the very least around 500 - 600$ + yearly cost of running electricity wise

 

based off a 100 watt power consumption, running 24 hours would probably run you close to $100 a year, that alone makes google drive the better option. 

 

Unless you have more requirements than just sharing files, that require the use of an actual dedicated machine, id strongly recommend google drive/onedrive / dropbox / any other cloud storage solution out there that might be even cheaper.

[Catsrules]

Lets start with P2P services.

If you just want to share a large file every so often I would use this
https://reep.io/ - simple one time share large file. You drag a file or multiple files in to the window and share the link (you both need to leave the browser open during the transfer.)

 

If your looking for Sync large files you could look in to programs like

Resilio or Syncthing - These are designed for syncing folders so it will sync everything that you want shared I don't think you can just pick and choose what file you want It is all or nothing. If you add something to the folder it will sync to to everyone who has the share setup. It uses P2P protocol so the more people you have sharing the faster it will be for someone else to download it. Everyone is a client and a server. So if one of you turn off your computer the others will still be online to share the file. it is a good solution to the slow upload speed problem. It is also nice because as soon as you add a new file it instantly starts coping out to the other peers where as central servers you need to upload to the server first and then the server will copy the file out to the clients.

 

Now on to centrally located servers.

Drobbox, google drive, onedrive, amazon drive etc etc. are all very easy to use and are relatively cheap. They will have great upload and downloads speeds with professional hard ware and software and people running the servers. Very good way to go, honestly can't really go  wrong with using these services. The only disadvantage with them is you do loose control over your data if your concerned about that.

 

Nextcloud

Nextcloud is a selfhosted dropbox. Put it on a server at home or server in the cloud and your good to go. It can be a little challenging to setup you do need to have a basic understanding on how networking and servers.  This is a very good option if you really want to get your hands dirty, and learn how to setup and run a server. Down sides are your stuck with whatever internet connection is connected to it. If it is locally hosted at someones house. It is probably going to be super slow most home internet connections are garbage on the upload speed.

 

[manikyath]

43 minutes ago, factorialandha said:

1TB google Drive = $120 a year

if you need a decent office package as well (which from a long time libre office user.. there's a good reason why people pay for MS office..) o365 with 1TB of onedrive probably ends up being a better deal, besides, last time i tried the google drive desktop sync client thing.. it was god awful..

 

also, slight correction to be made on the file server power usage.. if you buy your hardware smart, thats probably something you can press down to 40 watts easily.

[KirbyTech]

Just rent storage online like Drop Box,Google Drive, One Drive ect will be much cheaper than building your own. Remember they only make money because of scale, you will not save money by building your own. If you want a fun project go buy a Dell R710 LFF with a H700 RAID controller and put in 6 drives. Set up Next Cloud I think it is, and that should give you what you want but for ~$750

[Communal Noodle]

I'd go the Office 365 Route - you get office and 1TB of One Drive storage. I did that for us in the end.

[LAwLz]

The way I see it, you only have 2 sane options.

1) Share the files from your computer. There is no need for a separate home server. Just run some FTP server on your desktop and port forward to it. It will work just like a home server would, without the cost of buying and running another computer.

 

2) Just use some online storage like Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, Mega, or whatever. The benefit of this is that the download speed for your friends will most likely be far higher since most people have a terrible upload speed.

[BeefyMeats]

I have to support google drives and one drives for a few thousand people. I would stay away from one drive, and their crappy client. Never really had issues with google drives though.

 

Other than that you would have to rent some VPS servers in "the cloud" or maybe give Amazon AWS a go.

 

If its just a short time you could run a SFTP server program on your main machine just to get the data out to them.