HOSTING YOUR OWN CLOUD

If connecting multiple cloud providers together doesn’t solve your organisational headaches – or if you simply don’t want to rely on third-party cloud services – it’s easy to set up and host your own cloud with effectively unlimited storage. The key is a free software platform called (appropriately enough) ownCloud, which provides desktop clients for Windows, macOS and Linux, plus apps for Android and iOS.

If there’s a catch, it’s that the ownCloud back end runs on Linux; there isn’t a native installer for Windows. For most of us, therefore, the easiest way to run it is on a Raspberry Pi. OwnCloud is conveniently built into the Diet Pi distribution ( dietpi.com), and if your microSD card isn’t big enough for the files you want to store, you can attach an external USB hard disk to serve as your cloud repository. The server is also available for many NAS platforms; check your appliance’s web portal for a downloadable app. For those who prefer to install the software themselves, tailor-made packages for Ubuntu, openSUSE, RedHat Enterprise Linux, Centos and Fedora can be had from owncloud.com/download-server.

Once ownCloud is up and running, you can leave the desktop apps to take care of synchronising files and folders, or connect to the web portal to access and manipulate items directly. If you register with a dynamic IP service such as noip.com and set your router to forward incoming web connection requests to the ownCloud server (the default ports are 80 and 443), you can even access and synchronise your files remotely, as you would with a commercial cloud provider.

Remember that, while the files you store in ownCloud might be replicated across multiple computers, no-one is keeping offsite copies or retaining older versions of files – things that third-party synchronisation services would otherwise take care of for you.