Building a computer

[aruvqan]

I sort of feel like a kid in Peanuts listening to whawhahwa =)

Let me 'splain … I write fanfic, and there are about 9 fanfic writers groups on Yahoo and we are tired of our files being inaccessible or missing and suddenly reappearing randomly, with no way to actually contact yahoo [yahoo groups seems abandoned for all intents and purposes] and honestly, it is a pain in the ass uploading and sharing [not by downloading, like most people think of file sharing … you click on the link in the file and it opens up another browser page to read the fan fic upon though you can cut and paste to effect a download onto your own computer I suppose]

There are probably 20 of us active, not sure how to figure out how much data storage we would actually need offhand, but I also want to store my own data, and besides the 2500 discs of music of my brothers, we have several thousand ebooks, audio books and photographs [all of the familial photos, and scanned archives] and I want to build the damned thing once so I figure a minimum of 2 multiterabyte discs to the yahoo groups [combo of images and text] plus storage of in group emails, and then separated from my familial personal data. I suppose 8 or 9 drives would work, but all I seem to see is towers with 2 or at best 3 drive bays and that is why I mentioned once seeing the tower with the dozen bays. I do not want a huge rack system, we currently have space for a classic full sized tower and that would be squeezing [our whole studio apartment for the 2 of us is 15 feet by 30 feet with a chunk out for the stair well … ]

I am not fond of ‘cloud computing’ and the main issue with dropbox is everybody has to have it installed, and everybody needs to have the same size installed because the files seem duplicated on all the participants [i shared a dropbox setup with my eve online buds, and everybody had to be cautioned NOT to erase anything from ‘their’ dropbox because it would erase the file from everybodies. Is it still the same way?] and many of our members are tablet based which is why the whole group on a server somewhere that they ‘phone into and sit there and read on a browser while the file is open on their browser’ is how it has to work. None of us has oodles of money to pay for a monthly fee, which is why I wanted to see if it was something I could run out of my house - remember the old bulletin boards that someone would have on a computer churning away in the corner of their bedroom back in the 90s? Something like that …

Sorry for being vague, bad night and I am running on about 3 hours of sleep in the past several days =(

@moes_lotion

You might want to consider buying an network attached storage (NAS) device for this purpose. I have been using a Synology DS614 loaded with 4 3 terabyte drives configured as a RAID 5 array for a couple of years now as a back-up device. This configuration gives me 9 terabytes of storage. The unit comes with a file server built-in, allowing you to create shares and user accounts to control who gets access to what. The total cost (Canadian dollars, 2 years back) was about $1100. The unit has two gigabyte speed ethernet ports to share the load if multiple users are accessing the data.
.

and how much physical space does this take up, and what is a RAID?

@lingyi

Your ISPs Terms Of Service likely prohibits sharing files through their service.

For example, Comcast TOS:

"TECHNICAL RESTRICTIONS

use or run dedicated, stand-alone equipment or servers from the Premises that provide network content or any other services to anyone outside of your Premises local area network (“Premises LAN”), also commonly referred to as public services or servers. Examples of prohibited equipment and servers include, but are not limited to, email, web hosting, file sharing, and proxy services and servers;"

Comcast Acceptable Use Policy for High-Speed Internet

And of course, music, videos and anything with a copyright that isn’t your group’s is a no-go.

Glad I don’t have COMCAST …

@Terminus_Est

[Underscoring mine.]

They prohibit sharing files to the general public. As long as access is restricted to your home network or WiFi, you’re in the clear.

And wha about to a closed group?

@DPRK

Ninjaed.

Anyway, I did not get the impression the OP wanted to run a public service (like commercial Dropbox or The Pirate Bay), rather that, e.g., she wanted to share a cat picture to readers of this thread, but it would be hosted on an instance of ownCloud on her private server instead of on Dropbox. Definitely not the same as a file storage dump open to the general public, for which the ISP will want you to pay business rates.

Exactly, a bunch of fanfic authors sharing between ourselves of our own work product

@lingyi

I guess I wasn’t clear in my post that I was referencing this:

“Also, would it be possible to have a private version of a yahoo group - there is a set of the yahoo groups that I am a member of that would love to find a place to host our files for access to members - could it be run on this file server?”

In which case a file sharing site like Mega or Dropbox would be appropriate or maybe a private FTP (do people still use FTP?) hosted on a server.

Edit: Or a private torrent, which would ease individual server requirements.

this is pretty close to what i was asking =) can i own a tower with hard drives and an internet connection that 20 or so people could log into to upload fiction and temp download into a browser to read other writers fiction without having to pay monthly to some server farm somewhere, having the tower sitting in a corner of my room bubbling away. Old school BBS almost I guess?

[septimus]

@Noelq

Storage used to be expensive. Now, its cheap as hell. I carry around in my pocket a 16 gig thumbdrive. I bought it 10 years ago for about 90 dollars. Nowadays, you can get it for three.

16 Billion bytes for $3 ?? Is that a misprint?

At my job we had four IBM 2311 disk drives, each with 7 Megabytes. IIRC, the monthly rental on that string of drives was about the same as my monthly salary.

[DPRK]

I still don’t see how you calculate filling up 8 or 9 drives, or even 8 or 9 TB.

RAID means you use for instance 2 drives instead of one, with data mirrored on both so you can replace one when it fails rather than all your data going up in smoke. It’s not a backup solution, that is a separate issue, but it provides some reliability against errors and crashes with today’s multi-terabyte hard disks.

Next issue, you can totally run everything you mentioned on your own server- I even named specific software that will do it. Or you can pay for Amazon S3 storage if you don’t feel like enough of a hacker or simply don’t want to deal with a NAS, disks, backups, electric bill, etc; it’s not that expensive. Up to you…

[scr4]

@aruvqan

I am not fond of ‘cloud computing’ and the main issue with dropbox is everybody has to have it installed, and everybody needs to have the same size installed because the files seem duplicated on all the participants

That’s not true, you can access files over the web and download individual files if you don’t want to install the cloud software. And you don’t have to sync everything, you can choose which folders to sync. I think these are true for most cloud storage services.

[i shared a dropbox setup with my eve online buds, and everybody had to be cautioned NOT to erase anything from ‘their’ dropbox because it would erase the file from everybodies. Is it still the same way?]

I don’t know, I stopped using Dropbox for that reason. Google Drive doesn’t seem to have that problem.

and many of our members are tablet based which is why the whole group on a server somewhere that they ‘phone into and sit there and read on a browser while the file is open on their browser’ is how it has to work.

Most cloud storage apps for phones/tablets download files on demand, if that’s what you mean. Personally I want to carry a copy of my entire OneDrive and Google Drive folders on my tablet (I have a 512GB SD card in it), but their official apps don’t give me that option. I have to use a third-party app (FolderSync) to sync all files.

None of us has oodles of money to pay for a monthly fee, which is why I wanted to see if it was something I could run out of my house - remember the old bulletin boards that someone would have on a computer churning away in the corner of their bedroom back in the 90s? Something like that …

I think only the “owner” of the cloud storage account needs to pay for the service. If you share it with a group of people, those people should be able to access it for free. I’m sure there is a limit to that though, and I don’t know exactly what that limit is.