Your own owncloud – in the cloud

By | 29. Mai 2015

You are probably aware of Owncloud. A software that lets you run your own cloudstorage. Like Dropbox but you are in charge of the hard- and software it runs on.

That obviously has a some advantages, especially regarding the „safety“ of your data against data theft or privacy violations. You don’t have to rely on Dropbox *not* to scan your data or hand them over to the NSA.

On the other hand, running your own cloudservice has also some disadvantages. You have to install and maintain the hard- and software yourself. You have to have an eye on the disc capacity, the health of the harddiscs, online availability of your server, a backup strategy and so on and so on.

So this is a decision between comfort and security. How much security or privacy are you willing to give up in order to gain more comfort?

I for my part just recently tried to find a compromise between delegating as much of the „annoying“ work to the cloud while keeping as much of my privacy as possible.

So the idea was born, to run my own cloud „in the cloud“.

Or, to be more precise, I am currently running a Docker container with Owncloud on an Amazon EC2 instance. The SQL part of Owncloud is handled by Amazons RDS service and for the data storage of the Owncloud I am making use of ObjectiveFS. A filesystem that encrypts your data on the client side and mounts directly into Amazon S3.

ObjectiveFS is installed inside the container and mounts it on every „docker run“ into Owncloud’s data storage directory.

This means, that you have literally unlimited storage for your Owcloud instance and the data on S3 gets  encrypted on „your“ device and stays therefore quite safe. In addition to that this solution is pretty mobile. If your container or your instance dies, just fire it up on another container/instance or, if you don’t have any more need for owncloud, mount the ObjectiveFS filesystem on your Mac or server and copy your data elsewhere.

 

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