Have you heard about the latest Raspberry Pi-powered cloud service? If you are a user looking for the benefit of a ubiquitous Dropbox-type of storage service spending only a small amount from your pocket and not sharing your data with some third party, then OwnCloud can help you. It is one among the ultimate open source software programs that is available in the market. It can help you to build your own personal and secure Raspberry Pi-powered cloud service.

Uses of OwnCloud

Before starting with setting up your Raspberry Pi-powered cloud service, it is important to understand the uses of Owncloud. Using OwnCloud, a user can synchronize and share personal data and retrieve it from a device of their choice, provided it is bridged to the Internet. OwnCloud encrypts your files for additional security. In OwnCloud, files are synchronized with the help of the desktop client or web browser on the Windows operating system, Mac OS and Linux, or mobile based clients for Android phone and Apple’s iOS devices. The OwnCloud server can keep previous versions of every modified file. It also helps you to regress to a prior version with very little problem.

Steps to setup Raspberry Pi-powered cloud service

The following steps should be performed to set up Raspberry Pi-powered cloud service.

1. You will need a USB disk that is portable for holding the data. It’s recommended to have a self-powered disk for better performance. You need to ensure that its IP address is static.
2. Then use the packages in OwnCloud’s Debian repository and then refresh the repositories for the installation of OwnCloud.
3. Next, the user should install the OwnCloud server and all its essential dependencies. This action will now install MySQL database. Once, MySQL database is set up, the user has to set a root password. The Apache web server is automatically configured by this process. The user needs to enable some modules in Apache and restart Apache.
4. If the user wishes to upload files that are more than 2MB, then he needs to tweak the configuration file of PHP.
5. The user has to install the APC PHP accelerator so that the OwnCloud installation is concise on bigger installations. Then he has to restart Apache to bring the cache online.
6. After this, the user has to prepare the storage medium by plugging the USB disk into a Raspberry Pi. Once plugged, he has to enter “sudo blkid” in the terminal and note down the corresponding UUID. The user has to make a directory to mount the drive. Once rightly mounted, ‘fstab’ file should be edited to ensure that it is mounted automatically.
7. After installation, the user needs to configure his cloud. Following this, he has to start a web browser and go to the OwnCloud installation. Then the user has to create an account in the OwnCloud administrator for that user.
8. Now, MySQL database should be used to store files. Storage of files should be under the USB drive.
9. Next step is to enter details about the connection of the database server by entering host as “localhost” and username as “root,” along with the configured password.

OwnCloud is now successfully set up. Now the user is ready to log into his Raspberry Pi-powered cloud service as administrator using the account details he just created.

By following these steps any user can easily set up a Raspberry Pi powered cloud service.