How to turn a Raspberry Pi 3 Into Your Personal Private Cloud Server

Raspberry Pi is a miniature computer with the power of a budget PC or smartphone and yet powerful enough to allow you build custom devices, media centers and even servers. You can turn your Raspberry Pi into an omnipresent cloud service like Dropbox or Google Drive. With this, you’ll be able to access your files from a remote location and share your files with other devices.

In this guide, I will show you two comprehensive ways to turn your Raspberry Pi into your personal cloud server. Before you continue, I assume you have your Pi powered up with a mouse and keyboard connected to it, and finally Raspbian OS installed on it.

Method 1: Using FE Private Cloud

Before you continue with this guide get the following files:

• FE Private Cloud Raspberry Pi client (Ensure you have a FE Private Cloud account)
• File Expert for Android

1. Extract the contents of the FEPrivateCloud_raspberryPi.tar.gz file using the following command:

   tar -xvf FEPrivateCloud_raspberryPi.tar.gz

2. Open a terminal inside the extracted folder and change the permissions of the contents inside the extracted folder with the following commands.

   chmod +x service
   chmod +x server

   

3. Start the FE Private cloud service by entering the terminal command:

   nohup ./service > privatecloud.log 2>&1 &

4. Log into the server and configure it by entering the following commands:

   ./server -u [username] -p [password] – Enter your FE Private Cloud account credentials.

   ./server -d (Creates a full private cloud directory)

   ./server -quit (Logs out from the server)

   ./server -help (Offers offline help)

   
   You can also use this all in one command in order to avoid entering the commands one-by-one:

   ./server -u [username] -p [password] -d [path/to/storage/server –start

5. On your Android phone, open FE Private Cloud, sign in to the service and select Private Cloud from the menu.

After connecting to the server, you can access and manage your files from multiples with your smartphone and other devices either at your home location or from a remote location.

Method 2: Using 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 devices connected to the internet. Additionally, OwnCloud offers encryption and keeps older versions of all changed files and enables you to roll back to older versions with less effort. Here’s how to install and set up OwnCloud on your Raspberry Pi.

1. Open up a terminal session and add the OwnCloud repositories and then install OwnCloud with 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 – It installs MySQL database as dependency and will ask you to set up a root password, which you should.

   sudo a2enmod headers rewrite env

   sudo apachectl restart

If you wish to upload files that are greater than 2MB in size, open the PHP configuration file located under in a text editor, search for the strings ‘upload_max_filesize’ and ‘post_max_size_variables’ and then change their value from ‘2M’ to your desired like size limit e.g ‘2G’ or ‘512M’

You can also install an accelerator with ‘sudo apt-get install apc’ and create an ini file at  and then add the following lines to the file:

extension=apc.so

apc.enabled=1

apc.shm_size=30

2. Plug in a storage medium into the Pi and enter the command ‘sudo blkid’ in the terminal – the storage will most likely be mounted at ‘/dev/sdXx’. Take note of the drives UUID, which has the form xxxx-xxxx and then mount the drive using the following commands. The command assumes your drive has been has a FAT32 filesystem.

   sudo mkdir 

   sudo mount -t vfat -o umask=007,auto,uid=33,gid=33 

   

3. Launch a web browser and navigate to the OwnCloud service at ‘192.168.x.x/owncloud’ where ‘192.168.x.x’ is the IP address of your Raspberry Pi. Since this is a fresh installation, you’ll be asked to create a new user account.

4. Configure OwnCloud to use the MySQL database and stores files in the connected storage device. Click the Storage & Database menu and then enter ‘/media/owncloud/data’ in the textbox next to the ‘Data Folder’ and then select ‘MySQL/MariaDB’ option in the 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, settings up clients and exploring other features of OwnCloud. If you want to access your OwnCloud server from a remote location, you will have to enable port forward on your router, whose instructions you can find on your router vendor’s website.