I recently started hosting my own cloud service and it has been an awesome experience. After having my smart phone for sometime i started running low on storage, while I had backed up some pictures to a local share this is not really convenient. We take pictures on our phones so that we can have them close by so having to be at home to view my photos and videos was not very interesting. With a few apps and a Linux server I was able to put together a cloud service for the whole family that we are all loving very much.
The setup
Own Cloud installed on the Linux server. I tried a couple own cloud plugins for multimedia and none worked out for me. Using own cloud’s android sync app I ran into issues as it would lock up my phone when syncing. To fix this two issues I decided to have Plex handle the multimedia stuff and CloudSync handle the syncing process. Since I already had Plex serving up my video content adding photos was a breeze, plex also displays all your photos as thumbnails on your phone which you can click to view while the own cloud app displays a file name list which you have to click on a file to view it. I installed cloudSync on all the phones that needed backing up, this is like the swiss knife of sync apps it supports several cloud services plus regular services such as sftp,ftp and webdav just to name a few. You can back up your data to different locations by setting up filters for each data type which is awesome as I don’t want pictures and videos in one folder.
With this setup am able to have pictures and videos synced instantly and rsynced between different storage clients for redundancy. Within minutes of any of any of the phones taking a picture or a video any of the other phones can view that content so no need to send each other whatever you just captured.
While regular cloud providers offer you a few gigs for free and you have to pay once you get over 20gigs by hosting your own cloud you have terabytes of data readily accessible under your own control. You can use this cloud providers for just backing up your sensitive documents that you need an offsite backup in case of fire etc but remember to encrypt it first.
So now with everything backed up I have cleared my phones storage barely using a quarter of it and I still have access to all the pictures and clips that have been taken by any phone in the house for the last few years.