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File Storage for Friends


roastdawgg

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My unRaid server (to be assembled next week) will primarily be used for the storage of my music, movies and photos.

 

I would however like to offer some storage for my friends (possibly for a small nominal fee) to store their files, like an offsite backup. Anyone currently doing this? Anyone have any ideas or comments on how this might be accomplished? I have a DDWRT router and would obviously want the security of a VPN.

 

For security I would recommend my friends backup an encrypted TrueCrypt volume (for the sensitive data).

 

I read about a service a while ago that allowed you securely store your files on pieces of other people's hard drives, scattered all over the internet/world. That is the impetus for this post.

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I think CrashPlan is what you are looking for. Others here have integrated it with unRaid, I plan on trying it myself next month. It encrypts files before they leave your friends computer and they won't have to setup a VPN.

 

Backing up a TrueCrypt volume wouldn't be efficient since they would need to send the entire volume each time it's backed up. CrashPlan will only send the changes since the last backup.

 

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I can not help you with the process of setting this up, but I wanted to give you a couple words of caution

 

Make sure before you do this you read up on some of the legal aspects of your plan. Once you take their data you will be responsible for it. A few things to think of.

  a. Will you have off unRAID backup. Once you take money I would back up incase of a server/ hard drive crash that takes out their data. You need a way to restore their data incase you lose it on the unRAID server

  b. Personal Identification Information (PII) Since they will have access to your servers, others can get in, Companies spend a lot of money on security and there sites get hacked all the time. Yours will more than likely be hackable and it may go unnoticed for some time because you do not have an IT department to detect the hack in. Once you lose there PII and their identity gets stolen you may have some liable for the for this.

  c. Securing your shares, If some how they or someone else was were able to get your music/ movies and steal them you could be liable for the copyright violation.  

 

There are a lot more questions that others may be able to ask, but once you ask for money you are now a business, and in my experience it is never a good thing to mix business with friendship. The friendships usually will be lost because something goes wrong.

 

Sorry not being able to he with what you want to do, I just didn't want you to make a decision with out having all the information.

 

Burt

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Awesome. I will look at CrashPlan. Thanks for all of the information.

 

Is anyone else actually doing this? What are your experiences, tips, tricks?

 

I have my parents and sisters entire computers backing up to my unRAID server.  My personal laptop also backs up to the server.  My pastors laptop also backs up to the server, when she remembers to leave it on to back up at night.

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So the BuddyBackup system is exactly what I want to do, thanks for the link. However that being said the problem is that it is not linux/Ubuntu compatible. My friends all run windows/mac mostly but on my end I have Ubuntu on my desktop which is ON all the time and then unRaid is linux-based. So no way to make this work now.

 

I will keep hunting.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I've been using CrashPlan since it was released. I have it installed on my Windows 2008 Server and have several friends and businesses backing up to it. I also have the server itself backing up to another computer via the net for extra security.

 

This is certainly something I intend to setup on my Unraid server (building this weekend).

 

Note, it's a good idea to seed the backup from your friends if they have a lot of data, this will make things much quicker.

 

Read about it here: http://support.crashplan.com/doku.php/how_to/seed_archive

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