Run your own personal cloud

Fed up with storage quotas and monthly subscriptions? Darien Graham-Smith finds out how to turn a Raspberry Pi into your own private cloud server

- Darien Graham-Smith

In an age when we’re all living and working across multiple devices and locations, cloud storage is indispensable. Unfortunately, it costs money – at least, it does once you go beyond the limited quotas offered by the likes of Box, Google Drive and OneDrive. If you’re feeling squeezed by the storage limit on your current cloud plan and aren’t eager to take on yet another subscription, it’s easier than you might think to set up your own personal cloud, with no fees and no storage caps.

There are some downsides to running your own cloud. Obviously you have to provide the hardware yourself. However, this doesn’t have to be expensive – you can use an old PC, an existing NAS or – as we’ll explore on these pages – a dirt-cheap Raspberry Pi board.

You also have to look after your own data, and take steps to minimise the risk of losing files in the event of a burglary, fire or hardware failure. We’ll talk about some of these below.

Other than that, though, it’s all upside. With your own cloud server you can use as much storage as you like, while taking advantage of familiar features such as automatic syncing, on-demand downloads and secure sharing. What’s more, you can keep all your data in your personal possession, rather than entrusting it to a global megacorporation. So what are you waiting for?

Picking a platform

The hardware requirements for a cloud server are very low. The synchronisation service runs in the background and requires minimal CPU power; the main requirement is that the host should be kept switched on and online at all times, to keep your cloud files accessible and up to date.

As for the software, there are a few options to choose from, but we like the open-source Nextcloud package (nextcloud.​com