[TriLUG] Slightly Off Topic - personal NAS or Cloud Service?

[Jeff T. Riffer via TriLUG]

On Sat, 31 Jan 2015, Howard Boyd wrote:
> Recently had a hard drive failure and found out the cloud service I was 
>using (Just Cloud) was not automatically backing up my video files. They 
>want to charge me an extra fee to backup my video files.

Check-out OwnCloud:	https://owncloud.org/

FOSS cloud solution. Oooh they just released 8.0 I'll have to go try that!

I have it running on a CentOS 5.11 server and it works fine. It supports 
encryption, individual user quotas and a whole bunch of nifty features. You 
can even link an OwnCloud account to DropBox, essentially mounting your 
DropBox inside OwnClouds.

Clients are available for Windows, Linux and Mac for desktops, as well as 
IOS and Android apps. The apps aren't free but literally only cost a $1.

I use OwnCloud to backup sensitive personal data as well as family digital 
pics and videos. It's useful for synching (albeit manually) my password file 
as well.

The main disadvantage is of course you need a server to run it on so it's 
not necessarily cheaper or more reliable than a paid cloud service. OTOH, 
you have more control over it and can be sure no one is snooping your 
content. For folks in an Enterprise environment it can be an awesome way to 
share and backup files internally without violating corporate policies etc.