I’ve talked a bit about installing Nextcloud on various devices in recent posts, but thus far I’ve not explained how you can access your server from outside your home network.
Thankfully, it’s relatively easy to do.
Services like Dropbox are great, but I always recoil slightly at the use of the term “The Cloud” when really all that means is “someone else’s computer”.
Now that we have our RAID array setup and working it would be nice if we could actually STORE some data on our home server. In this part I’m going to show you how you can setup some folders on your array from the command line and then share those folders across your network.
Once this is setup you’ll be able to drag and drop your files from any other Windows, Mac or Linux machine.
In Part 1 of this guide I showed you one way to put together a home server using off-the-shelf PC hardware.
In this part I’m going to discuss the various options for operating systems before making a recommendation and then taking you through the installation.
Because most home servers will operate “headless” (with no monitor or input devices attached) I’ll also take you through the process of accessing your server from another device on your network so that you can make changes to it.
Setting up a RAID array is an important step in setting up any home server. Doing so will ensure that your data is protected if one (or more, in some circumstances) of your hard disks fails.
What’s more there are usually some performance benefits to a RAID setup as data can be sourced from multiple drives, effectively increasing performance beyond that of a single drives normal read speed.
