Roundup.....................

Why pay a company to look after your data, asks Mayank Sharma, when there are plenty of self-hosted, secure, open source options to choose from?

Mayank Sharma reveals why he’s never lost a file using his favourite file sync services and server tools.

Virtually all of us use computing devices only to acquire and accumulate data. Spend an hour browsing the web on the netbook and before you know it, the Downloads folder is bursting at the seams with images and video files. Do some light coding as you flip through the programming manual and you end up with a choked Documents folder. Take the new camera phone out on a late summer’s afternoon and the 32GB SD card quickly runs out of space as you snap away at the scenery.

When you look at it this way, the thought of an always-on, central data repository that also makes your data accessible from anywhere doesn’t really sound like overkill – even for the average home user. This would explain the exponential growth of Dropbox and similar services that charge money to manage your data for you. However, these services aren’t everybody’s cup of tea. Thankfully, a little bit of DIY can get you the convenience of an omnipresent Dropbox-like storage service without shelling out wads of cash and your data to a third party.

In this month’s Roundup we’ll look at some of the most popular open source tools for hosting your data and sharing it with others on your terms. These make more sense today with the continuous tumbling cost of storage. You can plug these into an old unused hardware and repurpose it as the server for these solutions on test here, which have miniscule hardware requirements. In fact, some even put out server images for the Raspberry Pi!

“An always-on, easily accessible central data repository doesn’t sound like overkill these days…”