Do you trust facebook with your photos.

Do you trust youtube with your videos.

The companies are good at what they do.

Especially dropbox.

You should consider using them to save important files.

no no and yes.


I use dropbox, but only for unimportant things.

Youtube isn't video storage, its video SHARING.

its pretty ******* hard to share something that's sitting on your hard-drive.

than said, Youtube has a bad habit of banning videos for pretty much no reason, so if i DID upload anything, i'd have copies backed up incase i need them again.


and no, i don't upload anything to facebook.

What if I told you that it's not that difficult to set up your own "cloud" storage. All you need is a computer you don't mind leaving on, as many hdd's as you want, and an Internet connection.

First step, sign up for Dyndns and set it up in your router. It's a service that lets you access your home network from a URL eg You need to login to view this link

Then set up network shares on said computer.. You can do it using windows, but I find operating systems like FreeNAS or OpenFiler to be much easier to set up. Those two also let you do other cool things with the server, such as FTP, web hosting, and DLNA media sharing for streaming music and videos. They also will let you combine the storage of multiple disks into one big disk (known as RAID)

You don't even need to use a computer, there are plenty of NAS's that will do the job really well (but they can be expensive)

Forward ports to the server in your router's settings for things you want to access from outside of your own network, Eg port 21 if you want FTP, port 80 if you wanted to host a website, etc

Enjoy your own cloud storage, under your own control, located in your own home. I know it probably sounds difficult/expensive, but it has been pretty convenient for me and worth the 3-4 hours of setup & research time it took.

<One of my storage servers, soon to have 12TB running FreeNAS

or... i could just take the computer for my personal use, and then store all the data on the numerous harddrives, then not bother with the rest of it?

I think the point of cloud storage is to keep files safe to be downloaded from anywhere.

Housefire and mass waterdamage isnt going to ruin your important files even with your home server.

Besides, iamnuff's point was not to allow a company to control your data. If your data is that valuable to you that you don't want someone else holding on to it, then you should have your own backups regardless of whether you're using a company's "cloud" or not

if you have local backups then why would you need cloud?

personally, i would probably use my local versions for everyday use, then have the cloud version as the backup copy.

I don't want to sound old fashioned, or paranoid, but half of the digital services that i use cut out right when i need them the most, or arbitrarily refuse me service until i get on the phone and yell at CS till they fix it.

did you hear about that guy who had about $500 worth of games in his steam libary, then they said the way he was gifting was against T&C and closed his account?

i mean, i do use steam, because its conviniant and cheaper, but i still feel a lot more comfortable with a hard-copy of the game, just knowing that someone sat in an office at steamworks HQ can take away all my games (that i paid for!) with the click of a mouse is pretty infuriating.

not to mention, my IP is kinda shoddy.

most of the time it works ok, but sometimes i get terrible slowdown, and sometimes it cuts out for hours at a time.

if i want to play a game, or listen to some music, then it needs to be locally stored, or i'm ******* stuck aren't I?

I forgot to address this question. "if you have local backups then why would you need cloud?". Keep in mind that a backup should be offline and stored in a safe place, and therefore will be inconvenient to access, should you need it. Anything else is technically just a duplicate and not a backup.

Well, the only purpose of using a "cloud" service is to get access to your files from locations apart from your home.... unless you plan on taking all of your backups with you wherever you go just in case you want a particular file, you might want to use a cloud storage service for that reason, be it your own as I've been describing, or a service like DropBox.

I ran out of room, but I'll properly explain my setup for you.

All, games/programs are locally installed on my desktops and laptops that I need.
All of my downloaded/recorded media is located on a fileserver (in my own home, Ie Locally stored) so it can be streamed to any computer in the house that needs it.

Now because I've done the port forwarding to the Internet and the DynDNS setup, those files are also accessible when I'm away from home via any Internet connection (Eg, university or work's Internet connection for me)

It's still your storage, on your server, under your control. But it's stored in a way that gives everyone in your home access to the files as needed as well as access over the net, which is all a "cloud" really is in it's barest essence. If you have multiple disks, the server can also combine them into RAID to provide redundancy should one of the disks ever fail. Meaning you won't loose anything if set up right. (Note, that redundancy =/= backup, a backup is offline, and offsite)

The server also does my torrent downloads for me, freeing up the net connection during the daytime, but that's just another convenient feature of running a computer 24/7.

Sure, it's more effort than most people can be bothered with, but It is how you get around the problem of having cloud storage controlled by someone else.

But as for your IP (I guess you mean your Internet connection) Well, if it's flakey then It's probably not suited for hosting your own cloud. (You should probably take the time to fix your net connection, that **** shouldn't drop out)

Well, games and apps always need to be locally installed (That's a given), unless you like downloading the whole program/game every time you run it. But as for music, that can be streamed over the Internet from your own Internet connection (provided you have enough bandwidth), or inside your own network can be streamed very easily. Videos are much harder to stream over the net, but I stream HD videos from my fileserver to a Raspberry PI connected to my TV. You can't tell me copying files to an external drive, then plugging it in is more convenient than just streaming over Wi-Fi or Ethernet.

Backups are (should be) offline, so If it's a tape or HDD, it's sitting on a shelf, and disconnected. (I don't have to do that, because I usually have a copy on my laptop, and any data on my servers is in RAID 1 or 5 to give disk failure redundancy) But it've found it convenient to be able .. say, "I need a file, It's on my fileserver at home which is connected to the net. I'll just log in and download it, instead of being unable to continue working."

I still think a single server that can store a library of music, videos, downloads, program installers, documents, etc in a single network location, that can be accessible from the net, is pretty frickin convenient, and is definitely worth the time and effort, especially in a family that all wants access to the same files (Downloaded movies and music in my case).

I'm not saying it's for everyone, but having your own fileserver accessible from the net will perform the function of a storage cloud, and is still under your complete control. Which is the concern you brought up in your first post. Take it or leave it.

I don't understand the relevance of mentioning steam, since it's a service where you are controlled by someone else.

Also, regarding the guy who got his steam account deleted, he must have been doing something pretty dodgy for them to do that. But I don't know, I haven't heard about that particular incident.

The reason you set up DynDns is so that you can access your files anywhere while you aren't at home, using a URL similar to the one I mentioned. (Perhaps I didn't explain that well enough)

Just today I downloaded some documents (I forgot to bring them to uni) directly on to my phone over 3G from my 1tb Fileserver.

Also, all of my files are reasonably safe from hacking since I force SSL for any external connections. And as far as natural disasters go, the two servers aren't that big to carry should there be a fire or something along those lines. But that's my situation, I can't guarantee it could be as convenient, should a disaster happen, for anyone else who hasn't planned ahead.

*is