I have been maintaining my private cloud network powered by Resilio Sync for a few years now. I have talked about it before. See this search for all those posts. When I built the original version of my private cloud the intentions were for it to provide a 321 backup solution for my stuff. The effort involved in maintaining the system turned out to be more time involvement than I would like. Overall even with more work than i thought it still has been largely a success for me.
At the time when I built the network my intention was to use Raspberry PI’s as my remote nodes. As my use of the system evolved that stopped being a viable solution. One of my first Raspberry Pi remote nodes had to be replaced. The drive i deployed just wasn’t big enough. That wasn’t a Pi specific issue. The next thing that happened was I ran into significant challenges around the amount of memory available on the a Pi II. Resilio would crash the Raspberry Pi. The reason was the app would consume all of the available memory until the OS froze. I had the same challenge on my Synology disk station at one point. That was fixable with a $15 4 gig memory upgrade. I was not able to do anything like that with the raspberry pi II.
To work around the limitations of the Raspberry Pi 2 was that I bought more powerful and thus more expensive computers. The two remote machines that I had running were fanless zotac z-boxes. They were great. The only downside was the cost that was significantly more than a pi. I bought a low-end Celeron version of the Zotac for around $150 plus memory and drives. The costs were about 4 times as much as a similar Pi 2 setup. At the time I had no good alternatives.
Then someone at work put me onto buying a Hardkernel ODROID-HC1 that was designed as a personal cloud type machine. It came with a case to put an internal hard drive in. The beauty of these machines were they had two gigs of memory and were not that much more expensive than a Pi 2 at around $50. I think I maybe spent $70 including memory card etc, not counting the hard drive. The hard drive was an internal one so cost to get one was cheaper than using an external one for the PI.
I purchased two ODROID’s within a year. One was at a friends house. The other was replicating data at home. I had problems with what I think was corruption of the OS on the SD card on both machines. The remote host had to be rebuilt twice. By the 3rd time it had a problem I gave up. I just didn’t want to spend the time troubleshooting it. I’m not sure why they continued to get corrupted. I still have one of them at home that has been pretty stable this year. I gave the remote one to my friend who hosted it for me. He was going to see if he could use it for something. The ODROID was a good idea however it did not turn into a long-term solution for me.
When I first started this private cloud project the public or consumer file storage services did not really offer zero knowledge encryption. The only service at the time that was financially viable for me to use was MEGA. I tried that out and it wasn’t seamless for me so I abandon a public cloud solution. I went with my private cloud. Today there are a few service providers that cater to people looking for zero knowledge encryption for remote storage. There still aren’t a lot of them however I was glad to see the landscape had evolved since I started this project.
I’m not sure what triggered my research into public clouds again. I started looking at what the cost benefit would be to go with a zero knowledge encryption public cloud provider instead of continuing to build my own network over last summer. I found a provider I liked, Tresorit. They ticked all the boxes for me on what I was looking for. The challenge was for 2 TB monthly cost over £20 a month. There only cheaper solution was not enough space for my needs.
When calculating the lifecycle of the hardware I buy for my own private cloud network versus the service costs of the provider it’s probably cheaper to keep doing it myself. Originally that was not true. From when I started this investigation in moving to a service provider until today there was a change in what kit was availible. The Raspberry Pi 4 came out. Having a need to replace the ODROID and possibly one Zotac at a minimum in the next 3 years would have been several hundred pounds. The Pi 4 was clocks in for the 4gig model at around £60 for the computer and all the accessories I needed minus a hard drive. I am recycling a hard drive so there is no additional cost there. When they announced the latest pi4 I immediately put in order for one of the 4gb models. My hopes were that it would perform well enough to use in my private cloud network. On paper it solves the memory usage issue of the Pi 2 & 3.
At the time of writing this I have had my first Pi 4 running in “production” for almost 3 months. The software has been pretty stable. I am running it within a docker container on a Pi 4. So far the system is consuming way less than 50% of memory. Ussually somewhere between 1 to 1.5 gig. One of the other clean up things i did was consolidate the many shares I had into 5 total shares. The Pi replicates 4 of them.
With the extra space i have on a remote node can also take local copies of the replicated data on that remote machine. That should complete my 321 backup strategy. Since I want to add extra resiliency into my plan I will continue to take annual point in time offline copies of most of my data.
Since I am reusing hard drives right now (i over bought on size I needed on the last upgrade and the drives are great) that means i can get another Pi 4 for £60 pounds and have a refreshed pair of remote nodes. I continue to use my Synology, my laptop, and a Linux server for the other nodes at home.
My costs this year are on target to be £60-£120. That is half the price of one year of cloud storage service. The new machines should give me 2 to 3 years of service easily. Especially since I’m deploying them with 5 TB drives and I’m only using about 1.3 TB for what I’m backing up today.
I am pleased that the build my own system is cheaper and continuing to work out vs the public cloud option. As long as maintaining the system is not a lot of trouble I picked the right option.