This note explains the motivation and goals of the project under the conditional name “Home Cloud”: how it differs from setting up computers in one single house.

Why?

After the note “IT at home”, the question might arise why are “Home servers and NAS” usually used? The following usage scenarios come to mind:

  1. File Archive
  2. Network file storage (when it is the only copy and is used directly from this storage – most often it is a video)
  3. Self-hosting: abandoning public clouds
  4. Local game servers (Minecraft and others)

Basic version

It is usually recommended to have at least 2 hard drives in the mirror (the information on them is the same for reliability). A 4GB disk can be taken for 6.3tr, two will be 12.6tr.

A boxed solution such as Synology NAS can be bought for that kind of money (without disks, the boxes themselves):

  1. Single-disc: DS120j 10.6tr
  2. Two-disc (2018 model): DS218PLAY 29TR
  3. This year’s two-disc (more powerful): DS223 81.5tr

We take the usual two-disc: DS218PLAY 29tr + 2 x Seagate lronWolf 3.5" 7200 6.3tr = 42tr

Is the price of 42 rubles adequate? This is somewhere in the area of the average PO. And you also need to deduct mandatory expenses for food and other things from the PO. That is, many people need to save for this for several months.

It is here that two (often simultaneous) scenarios arise:

  1. We abandon some requirements (we store less, do not run applications, etc.).
  2. We abandon boxed versions in favor of used or even some self-assembly.

Cheaper options

Clouds

The simplest thing is clouds. Yandex.Disk, Google Drive and others. There are problems here that it can stop working at any time for technical, political, financial and other reasons. However, this is not such a problem for backups - they are copies, it will be possible to organize new copies in a new location.

The following programs can help here:

  • https://kopia.io / – allows you to create copies so that you can extract them on a specific date and separate files (convenient for partial recoveries). It stores copies efficiently and allows you to encrypt them (because public clouds are a tasty target for hackers and sooner or later some cloud will be completely hacked).
  • https://cryptomator.org / – simpler solution (encryption only)
  • https://www.boxcryptor.com/en / – simpler solution (encryption only)

Clouds are very expensive, but they have quite large free tariffs that will allow you to save the most important things for free.

External hard drive

Usually it is not much more expensive than just a hard drive, and with some discounts it is cheaper (sometimes they even buy external ones, take the disks out of these boxes and put them in the NAS, but this is not always the case, and you do not need to buy 4TB in China for 1tr - this is 100% divorce). For 5tr, you can buy a 2TB disk, for 8.5tr for 4TB. It can be seen that the amount is cheaper by more than 10 times relative to the NAS.

At the same time, you can use the same program for easy copying https://kopia.io / . And you can configure it, for example, to copy everything to an external hard drive, and most importantly, to the cloud (there are quite large free tariffs).

Self-assembly

The idea is to buy a regular new or used hardware, set it up and use it.

In this case, there is no saving on disks - you need to buy as much as you need.

There are significant savings on the NAS itself, and it is also usually possible to install more disks, which means that you initially buy a smaller disk and, if necessary, buy more.

The main problems:

  • Low awareness of what is already possible
  • High complexity of configuration compared to boxed NAS - this difference can clearly be significantly reduced.

Conclusions

Current backup options, and even more so independent self-hosting of basic “cloud”/“office” applications, are expensive and/or difficult to implement, especially for “ordinary” people.

I personally cannot do anything about the requirements and the PO, but I consider it important to significantly simplify the “self-assembly”. This is a very real task. I try to solve it within the framework of my project “Home cloud” (in hobby mode).

I also recommend reading the note “Backup” – there’s a little theory on the topic.

PS. All prices on the day of publication from the offers on Ozon.