Selecting the Hardware
Let's say the whole family (and I mean the whole, from grandmas to little ones) is a wide cluster of users of a heterogeneous laptops, tablets and mobile phones, different brands and OS. So we have plenty of hardware and software, to like and dislike. The best way to share stuff could be a common cloud service, but due to the large amount of photographs, videos and other documents (like recipes books in pdf or doc), it is a very large amount of data, so the price per year is forbidding. Also there is a risk of losing the valued memories, so we need backup too. Yeah, that's sound like big needs, but we are just family.
Also a few of us want to enjoy the auto-backup feature, like the one in well known services provided by Dropbox, Google Backup and Sync (ye old' Drive), Microsoft One and Mega (among others). Some of these I use for my work at the university, and other at the IEEE IES Society.
So the questions are: Can we do this at home? Which hardware can be used to the task and how much will it cost? How easy it is for everyone to use?
As we are not a "massive data transfer" group, but we are family, our optical fiber access can do the trick. If the server is at home, then we have a symetrical 100 MiB/s data band that can be fine for the task, as we want to access photos and short videos. And we do not want anything like Kodi. Just sharing the files is OK. So something like a Raspberry Pi can do the trick, as far as a big hard disk is attached. And another hard disk drive off line can have a weekly backup, of the files and the database.
Well, this is a home project, so I tried to keep things in the good price vs quality ratio. My first option, due to the cost, is a Raspberry Pi 3 Starter Kit (R3). These kind of kits includes the R3 board, a nice plastic box to house the R3 card, an HDMI cable, a power source, and sometimes three aluminium or cooper radiators. Those are needed if you intend to run more demanding software on the ARM cores. Any way, adding them will not hurt the performance of the system. We will also need a microSD card with the software, that some kits also provide, an USB keyboard and an USB mouse. The R3 Starter Kit can be found for near 80 € / 90 $.
There are also other similar boards, that run Android, Linux, Windows and other OS flavors. But for me it is OK. Even as I am an opensuse guy since 1995, there are images of Leap 42.3 ready to run in this board, so here the heart rules the mind.
An RJ45 ethernet cable is also fine, because later the R3 will be connected to the router at 100 Mbit/s ethernet. Wi-Fi is not a good idea, as the routers we have at home right now are a bit old, so they provide 11 Mbit/s or, at their best, 54 Mbit/s. And if we have our mobile phones, then we have to share this among all of us, and we are family 馃槂.
And disk, a large one. As previously said, will keep things on a budget, so at first will give a try using an old external hdd with 290 GiB (320 GB), that was used many years ago as a backup storage. A Packard Bell Store & Save model from almost ten years ago. This big in size, little in capacity was waiting for his second chance in a drawer for quite a while, and now will become a good partner for the R3. If things runs properly, a 5 TB external hdd can be purchased for something like 145 € / 160 $ any time later.
The hardware budget is, up to the first test, on the 100 €. Not bad. A full system will be in the 250 €.
Read prior entry Make your own cloud server [←].
Read next entry Testing the disk [→].
Let's say the whole family (and I mean the whole, from grandmas to little ones) is a wide cluster of users of a heterogeneous laptops, tablets and mobile phones, different brands and OS. So we have plenty of hardware and software, to like and dislike. The best way to share stuff could be a common cloud service, but due to the large amount of photographs, videos and other documents (like recipes books in pdf or doc), it is a very large amount of data, so the price per year is forbidding. Also there is a risk of losing the valued memories, so we need backup too. Yeah, that's sound like big needs, but we are just family.
Also a few of us want to enjoy the auto-backup feature, like the one in well known services provided by Dropbox, Google Backup and Sync (ye old' Drive), Microsoft One and Mega (among others). Some of these I use for my work at the university, and other at the IEEE IES Society.
So the questions are: Can we do this at home? Which hardware can be used to the task and how much will it cost? How easy it is for everyone to use?
As we are not a "massive data transfer" group, but we are family, our optical fiber access can do the trick. If the server is at home, then we have a symetrical 100 MiB/s data band that can be fine for the task, as we want to access photos and short videos. And we do not want anything like Kodi. Just sharing the files is OK. So something like a Raspberry Pi can do the trick, as far as a big hard disk is attached. And another hard disk drive off line can have a weekly backup, of the files and the database.
Well, this is a home project, so I tried to keep things in the good price vs quality ratio. My first option, due to the cost, is a Raspberry Pi 3 Starter Kit (R3). These kind of kits includes the R3 board, a nice plastic box to house the R3 card, an HDMI cable, a power source, and sometimes three aluminium or cooper radiators. Those are needed if you intend to run more demanding software on the ARM cores. Any way, adding them will not hurt the performance of the system. We will also need a microSD card with the software, that some kits also provide, an USB keyboard and an USB mouse. The R3 Starter Kit can be found for near 80 € / 90 $.
There are also other similar boards, that run Android, Linux, Windows and other OS flavors. But for me it is OK. Even as I am an opensuse guy since 1995, there are images of Leap 42.3 ready to run in this board, so here the heart rules the mind.
An RJ45 ethernet cable is also fine, because later the R3 will be connected to the router at 100 Mbit/s ethernet. Wi-Fi is not a good idea, as the routers we have at home right now are a bit old, so they provide 11 Mbit/s or, at their best, 54 Mbit/s. And if we have our mobile phones, then we have to share this among all of us, and we are family 馃槂.
And disk, a large one. As previously said, will keep things on a budget, so at first will give a try using an old external hdd with 290 GiB (320 GB), that was used many years ago as a backup storage. A Packard Bell Store & Save model from almost ten years ago. This big in size, little in capacity was waiting for his second chance in a drawer for quite a while, and now will become a good partner for the R3. If things runs properly, a 5 TB external hdd can be purchased for something like 145 € / 160 $ any time later.
The hardware budget is, up to the first test, on the 100 €. Not bad. A full system will be in the 250 €.
Read prior entry Make your own cloud server [←].
Read next entry Testing the disk [→].
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