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Nine home clouds compared

Cloud It Yourself

Article from ADMIN 24/2014

By Dirk Ahrnke , By Markus Feilner , By and Kristian Kißling

Dropbox was the first of a number of cloud service providers. However, only services that promise full control over your own data can give users a feeling of security. We provide an overview of nine cloud projects and two BitTorrent tools.

"Fog can be considered a type of low-lying cloud," says Wikipedia [1], and who are we to argue; this definition sort of sums up the ambivalent nature of the whole cloud hype and the related services. The success of cloud file sharing and synchronization services like Dropbox leaves room for alternative offerings and projects, which are popping up like the proverbial mushrooms.

Dropbox, but Self-Managed, Please

What all these services have in common is that users transfer their data to a third party for fiduciary management. Most cloud services today only share the means of transport and entice users with partially free, or at least extremely convenient, offers of access to data from anywhere, along with the ability to share data with others.

The realization that this is not always a good idea started to mature when risqué images of celebrities began to emerge from the cloud. Additionally, the passion of government intelligence services for collecting data is virtually infinite. The affirmation of "We're the good guys" is always relative to the speaker's intent.

Nine Clouds and Two BitTorrents Compared

Hosting your own cloud is a potential answer to diverse dependencies. In this article, we examine software designed for private users and corporations. The minimum requirement our test team stipulated was that the software offered basic file sync mechanisms and at least partly allowed the user to control the transfer of data – that is, anything under the "Filesync and Share" (FSS) umbrella.

The following comparison starts with ownCloud and then presents eight alternatives (in alphabetical order) that provide similar services for Linux users. It also looks at the peer-to-peer-based approaches of BitTorrent Sync and Syncthing.

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