How to Create a personal Cloud and what are the limitations?

[JamesMay82]

Hello,

I'd like to create a personal cloud which I believe will just be through the use of a NAS? I've been watching YouTube videos but never found all the correct answers as they always seem to be sponsored and gloss over the details.

1. would I be able to keep my apple photos library on there and can it be accessed by multiple computers i.e. my laptop and a desktop but could my wife and daughter also access the photo library or will too many users corrupt it?

2. can it also be a Time Machine back up for our families machines - 4 devices

3. How fast will it be over the WIFI, I believe I have gigabit ethernet on my router which is a BT Smart hub 2 ( See spec below) will this be fast enough to edit video from?

4. can I access all the above if I'm away from my home?

5. what models do you all recommend. As a family we have 5TB of Data

6. How safe are they from hacking etc - just as safe as our Macs?

here is the spec of the router - thanks for any help/advice. ps reason for doing so is to save cash on all our iCloud storage plans plus the idea of being in control of our data.

 

[Boyd01]

I believe wifi 5 is the same as 802.11ac wifi? Using my macs at home on a local network, last time I tested (years ago) I could get speeds of 50-60MBytes/sec using my 2013 MacBook Air - one of the first generation(s) of Macs to support that protocol. Using wired gigabit ethernet with a 2012 Mini for the same thing on my LAN, it was in the 80-100MBytes/sec range. Some of the bottleneck was no doubt the speed of the local shared disk (on a 2014 Mini). Anyway, I don't use iCloud but suspect those would all be comparable to - probably better than - the speed you get now.

You could use a NAS, or just use an older Mac with Apple's built-in file sharing. I do this with a 2012 Mini as a fileserver, connected to four 5-tb hard drives. And I also have a 2014 Mini that I use as a media server with a 4tb ssd. It's very easy to set this up on a Mac - just one click in the sharing preferences. And since it's a Mac, you're already familiar with the hardware. Have not shopped for a NAS in a long time, but when I did, the inexpensive ones had pretty terrible performance.

You can certainly use the same device for time machine with a Mac as a server. I assume it's also easy to setup with a NAS. What I definitely would NOT do is put time machine backups on the same disk as everything else. IMO, backups should be on a dedicated disk drive. It could be connected to the same server though.

I know that people do make their home NAS available on the internet, but I would absolutely never do that. IMO, it's a huge security risk to make your home network available to the whole world. Yes, there are ways to secure it, but there are new exploits constantly being discovered by the bad guys. The sad reality is, as soon as you make anything available on the internet, it will immediately be under attack. I'm sure others may disagree, which is fine. It's just not a risk I would ever take. That's one of that attractions for using a commercial "cloud", they have staff whose job it is to keep it secure.

I would say this is not even close to being "just as safe as our Macs". Your Macs are (typically) only used as terminals or clients on the internet - they connect to somebody else's servers. But in this case, you're making a device potentially available to every hacker in the world.

You will also need to backup a home server yourself, preferably in more than one place. Mine are constantly backed up to local disks and also with Backblaze, so I still use the cloud.

So, if you just want a shared disk that everyone in your home can use to store files, that's easy to do with either a Mac or a NAS and should be fast and secure. But as soon as you want to access it from outside your home, it's a whole different matter. Also remember, if you have a problem with iCloud you can always contact Apple support. If you have a problem with a home server, then you are tech support. Since you're asking some pretty basic questions here, are you ready to assume that responsibility ("Daddy - all my pictures are gone!")?

 

[klspahr]

Years ago I played with the Mac Server app to set up a simple web server and email host at home. I noticed that within hours it was being probed. I couldn’t believe it! There is no way I want to constantly fight that battle. I found out I was way over my head and I wasn’t even using it for anything. It was a very short lived experiment.

Consider all the major companies that have had massive data leaks…

 

[JamesMay82]

@Boyd01 Thanks for all that write up - I didn't think about the built in file sharing and I do have an older Mac which could be used for this purpose. Do you know if I can share a photos library between our 4 different machines? also what happens if the Mac goes to sleep will it wake up when accessed?

@klspahr you both make good points about connecting it to the internet. its probably just not worth the risk.

 

[Boyd01]

Sorry, I have never used Apple's photos app, I manage all my media directly from the finder and edit with Photoshop, so Idon't know whether you can share a single photos library.

Personally, I have my servers set to never sleep. I do allow the hard disks to sleep on the fileserver, but the media server has an ssd so that isn't relevant. For something I use interactively (like watching video), I don't want to wait for the server to wake up.

There's a setting in the energy saver preferences to "wake for network access" - am still on Monterey, so not sure if that's still there on newer versions of MacOS. But the idea is that you can let your Mac sleep but it will wake up if somebody tries to access a file on a shared disk. I know others have mentioned that they do this, but I'm too impatient!