How to turn Raspberry Pi into a personal cloud server

Raspberry Pi - A "small but martial" device

The Raspberry Pi is a miniature computer with the power of an inexpensive PC or smartphone, yet powerful enough to let you build custom devices, media centers, and even servers. You can turn your Raspberry Pi into an ubiquitous cloud service, like Dropbox or Google Drive, to access your files remotely and share them with other devices.

How to turn Raspberry Pi into a personal cloud server Picture 1 The Raspberry Pi is a miniature computer with the power of a low-cost PC or smartphone

Turn Raspberry Pi into a personal cloud server with OwnCloud

OwnCloud is one of the best Raspbian software out there to help you create your own protected cloud storage service. With OwnCloud, you can sync and share your files, and access it from any Internet-connected device.

OwnCloud also offers the ability to encrypt and keep older versions of all changed files, allowing you to return to older versions with ease. Here's how to install and set up OwnCloud on a Raspberry Pi.

1. Open a terminal session and add the OwnCloud repository, then install OwnCloud using the following commands:

wget http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/isv:OwnCloud:community/Debian_7.0/Release.key sudo apt-key add -Release.key sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install owncloud sudo a2enmod headers rewrite env sudo apachectl restart

( sudo apt-get install owncloud installs the MySQL database as a dependency and will ask you to set a root password).

If you want to upload files larger than 2MB, open the PHP configuration file located at / etc / php5 / apache2 in the text editor, look for the strings upload_max_filesize and post_max_size_variables , then change the value of they go from 2M to the capacity limit you want, for example 2G or 512M.

You can also install an accelerator with sudo apt-get install apc and create an ini file at /etc/php5/cgi/conf.d/apc.ini and then add the following lines to the file:

extension=apc.so apc.enabled=1 apc.shm_size=30

2. Plug the media into the Pi and enter the command sudo blkid in the terminal - the memory will most likely be mounted at / dev / sdXx. Notice the drive's UUID, which should be of the form xxxx-xxxx, and then mount the drive using the following commands. This command assumes that your drive has a FAT32 file system.

sudo mkdir/media/owncloud sudo mount -t vfat -o umask=007,auto,uid=33,gid=33/dev/sdXx/media/owncloud

Enter the command to enable auto-mount:

sudo nano /etc/fstab UUID=6154-F660 /media/owncloud/vfat rw, umask=007,auto,uid=33,gid=33 0 0

3. Launch a web browser and navigate to the OwnCloud service at 192.168.xx / owncloud , where 192.168.xx is the Raspberry Pi's IP address. Since this is a new setting, you will be asked to create a new user account.

4. Configure OwnCloud to use a MySQL database and store files in the connected storage device. Click the Storage & Database menu , then type / media / owncloud / data in the text box next to the Data Folder , then select the MySQL / MariaDB option under Database.

Use localhost as the host, root as the username, and then the password you set earlier when setting up OwnCloud.

At this point, you can start uploading files to your server, install clients, and explore OwnCloud's other features.

Kareem Winters

Update 21 August 2020