This may not be directly related to unRaid (not sure if unRaid would be part of the solution for what I want), but seeing as you're a knowledgeable bunch about this stuff I thought maybe you guys might have some suggestions on how to accomplish what I want.

 

From a theoretical standpoint what I'm trying to accomplish here is basically having one single hard drive that all my computers (home desktop, work desktop, laptop, and phone) can see and edit, but not in the way that cloud storage options like Google Drive or Dropbox work. The issue I keep running in to with Drive (which is what I'm using) is that some files don't sync at all, or even worse the wrong version of some files get synced. I've had whole folders of files deleted because of Drive syncing the wrong thing.

 

What I want is one instance of every file, as if I were carrying around an external hard drive that I plug in to whatever machine I'm using at that point in time. I don't need a local file on every machine (which is how Drive has it), but rather just one version saved somewhere that I can access and edit from any machine as long as I have internet. Part of the reason I want to do this is my laptop has relatively little storage space (I have the hard drive partitioned for a few different OSes, and it's a SSD so it doesn't have a ton of storage to begin with), so I need basically a remote drive it can access that is sync'd with my other machines but that doesn't require the laptop to have a local copy of the files. I could do this with Drive, but it would basically require me to log-in and download any file that I want to edit, and then re-upload it.

 

The question is, what's the best way to do this. One thought is to create a VPN server and use a drive on my home network (either on my desktop at home or in my server) as the "master" hard drive. The problem with that is I'd basically have to be logged into the VPN all the time on my remote machines, which isn't ideal (since there are plenty of instances where I either need to be on my work network or logged into my work VPN). Something like logmein might work, but then that requires my desktop to be on all the time, which again isn't ideal. I suppose I could use logmein with my HTPC (since that's on all the time), but I'm wary of that as well. I don't know what other options are out there, which is largely why I'm here asking you far-more-knowledge individuals 

 

so yeah...thoughts?

The easiest method would be hamachi. Since hamachi creates a virtual adapter with your PC's, you can be connected to your work network or VPN through regular means, the hamachi adapter just "piggy backs" on that connection. It does require a home PC to be on all the time, but you can use hamachi with your unraid server(which I presume is on 24/7). As you said, you could use it with your HTPC as well.

that works beautifully, didn't know you could run hamacchi from unraid. thanks 

My only other question would be what would you gain from creating a VPN and using something like OpenVPN? In terms of transfer speed I assume it might be a bit faster, but the bottleneck for transfer speed is most likely going to be the upload speed of my broadband connection right? I was testing last night with the help of a friend and copying files she was getting a transfer rate of ~ 200KB/s. Considering my upload speed is only 2Mb/s I don't know if I could do much better than that.