Ask Slashdot: Distributed Online Storage For Families?

StonyCreekBare writes "What options are available for distributed storage for families? My two brothers, my daughter and her husband, and his mother all have homes in various parts of the country. We use various cloud storage providers to keep our shared data. This has numerous limitations and we are starting to think maybe we can do it better ourselves. We all have decent Internet connections, are all somewhat tech savvy, and think that by leveraging the Internet we can maybe provide for our needs better and at lower cost by buying some hardware and doing it ourselves. How would you go about implementing such a family-oriented, distributed cloud platform? What hardware? What applications, beyond simply the preservation and sharing of family data, (grandkids' photos, home videos, and more) would be good to leverage such a platform? Security Cameras? HTPC? VoIP? Home Automation? Primary requirements are Cheap, Secure, Reliable."

overthinking it!!!

[khelix]

has anyone thought of a simple VPN + NAS solution?

BittorrentSync or git-annex

[Anonymous Coward]

Off the top of my head, there's two obvious solutions I can suggest. Bittorrent Sync or git-annex. The former is easymode but limited in scope. The latter comes with a webui for some simple things, but also gives you a *lot* of power from the command line. I've never used either on Windows, but if that matters, Bittorrent Sync is probably the more stable of the two right now for that platform (but improved Windows support is the theme this month for git-annex's crowdfunded development, so it should be improving).

Obligatory FUCK BETA, because seriously... fuck it.

Re:overthinking it!!!

[jcbarlow]

Yes, the first thing you need is a firewall / VPN gateway at each home. IPCop or IPFire and an old PC will do nicely. Then once you have everyone on the same virtual LAN you can all share webcams, NAS boxes or whatever. A cron job that runs rsync at 2AM should keep everything backed up at multiple sites. KISS...