Raspberry Pi Owncloud (dropbox clone)

What I'm going to show you is how to build a your own personal dropbox like service using a raspberry pi and some software called OwnCloud. ownCloud gives you freedom and control over your own data. It's a personal cloud which runs on your own server.

If you don't want to go through the steps for downloading and setup up the software you can download the image I have setup from here. While I have done everything I can to check this is working it should be understood that you use at your own risk. If you do download the image you can skip to step 5. 

Step 1: What you need

A Raspberry Pi
An Usb External Harddisk or a USB Drive
An Enclosure for the Raspberry Pi and Hard Disk
Wireless network card (optional)

Comments

[greatpanda]

FYI, your command line text in step 5 should read sudo gparted, not sudo gprarted.

[hot-chili]

In response to adriancuervo:

99.9% of the general population  has no idea what open source is or cares about the ideology. They are not developers and they just want something that works. My neighbors and friends have no clue about what open source is when I bring it up in a discussion, and they all seem to concur about  going with a product  supported by a company.

BTW, although Real Time Logic could close the project, the software would still be available on the Internet for eternity. Just because software is old and not maintained does not mean it's not useful. I still prefer XP over Windows 8. In any event, I find it extremely unlikely that Real Time Logic would close the project.   Just because something is open source does not mean that it could not be shut down or maintained.

Owncloud is extremely slow on the Raspberry Pi. You should check out the following benchmarking, which shows how BarracudaDrive outperforms all major servers such as Apache and Nginx by a large margin.

http://barracudadrive.com/blog/2013/03/Apache-Nginx-Lighttpd-Monkey-and-BarracudaDrive-Speed-Test

[hot-chili]

BarracudaDrive is much lighter, faster, and includes more features:
http://store.raspberrypi.com/projects/barracudadrive

[adriancuervo]

Maybe, I did't check the features, but the point is: it's not Open Source. In other words, if in 2014 Real Time Logic closes this project, they kills you :) Open Source is the way in computer development.

[GR0B]

For a newer versions of owncloud use "4.5.7" instead of "4.5.1"

wget http://mirrors.owncloud.org/releases/owncloud-4.5.7.tar.bz2
sudo tar -xjf owncloud-4.5.7.tar.bz2

[village76]

Hi, thanks for this, got it up and running nicely. But at the end of your project you say that it would be possible to access the Rpi remotely using noip. Would this allow me to use the Rpi from a remote computer as if I was sat in front of it? Or would this just be another way of access owncloud?

Following these instructions (http://www.stuffaboutcode.com/2012/06/raspberry-pi-access-from-internet-using.html) I've set up the no-ip account, got a host and set the client running on the Rpi (which has a fixed internal IP address) but all I'm seeing when I put in http address in the browser (http://myname.no-ip.org) is the home page of my router. I see from other posts I need to set up port forwarding but I'm a bit new at this and can't work out which port I need to forward. I guess I'm then forwarding that port to the fixed IP address of my RPi. Once I've done this, what shoud I expect to see? Grateful for your views

[etossin]

I know it’s a lot to ask, but could you please upload a Raspberry Pi Image with Owncloud V.5.00 installed?

Or give instructions on how to update from version 4.51?

Thanks in advance!

[jshaw22]

I loved this guide but I kept struggling to get the permissions set and the thing firing on my USB drive. In the end, I used the apt-get package and it configured owncloud and permissions perfectly. Another bonus- upgrades. Just in case it helps someone reading this...

From http://software.opensuse.org/download/package?project=isv:ownCloud:community&package=owncloud

For Debian 6.0 run the following as root:

echo 'deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/isv:ownCloud:community/Debian_6.0/ /' >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/owncloud.list
apt-get update
apt-get install owncloud

You can add the repository key to apt like this:

wget http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/isv:ownCloud:community/Debian_6.0/Release.key
apt-key add - < Release.key

Cheers! Thanks for the guide.

[dcdevito]

@philpage85:

make sure /media/owncloud is mounted. From the command prompt type:

mount

And see (mine was /dev/sdb1) the usb drive mounted (you'll see /media/owncloud). If not simply type:

mount /dev/sdb1 /media/owncloud

[philpage85]

Hi I am hoping somebody can help?

I get to step 5 and enter

$ sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /media/owncloud

and I get

chown: cannot access '/media/owncloud': no such file or directory?

I am a noob to all this so any help would be grateful.

many thanks

Phil

[dcdevito]

I'm getting a "failed to write to disk" error when trying to upload videos, ranging from 150MB to 400MB in size. I'm trying to upload them individually but still get the error.

I am able to upload tons of pics with no issue. I see in php.ini the max upload size is set to 1200MB - is that too large perhaps? I also saw the temp directory location commented out so I un-commented it and created a tmp directory in /media/owncloud/tmp (and added it to the path in the .ini) - however, it still fails.

Any suggestions? Cheers

[bigme]

Haven't done much with our pi since getting this summer, this looks like a great idea. Of course if I get it set up my kids will think of another good use for the pi so maybe I should just order an additional pi before I get started.
Thanks for the great write up

[RJones06]

Great guide very helpful!

My isp blocks port 80 so i can't access owncloud through my DyDNS url.
I currently have a DyDns account setup and working for monitoring my torrent client when outside the network. (i access through http://mydyndnsurl.dyndns-free:port)

Would it be possible to access Owncloud through the same DyDns url on an alternate port? If so could you provide some instructions, i'm still learning the basics of debian and server administration.

Thanks again for the guide.

[DXM]

You should be able to set up port forwarding in your router to pass port 5000 for instance to Port 80 on the raspberrypi... that would allow access from port 5000 outside of your network and it will lead to port 80 on the Pi... hope that helps

[MutatioM]

Indeed a nice guide!

I took the easy way and started off trying the image file you'd created. There is a problem though, I can't bypass login, and I think it's your username/password information I have to use.

Thanks in advance,
if I'm just a big douche that misunderstood something simple, I'm sorry

MutatioM

[Steve-CC]

Great project - thanks.
It would be handy for me and others who are less familiar with the Pi and getting started if you would either explain how or point to where to get info on how to go from Step 1 to Step2. ie: Get the Pi ready to Set up the network and download the software.
I may just use your image - thanks for them - but there is a part of me that likes tinkering and it would be fun to go through the process.
In the meantime I will be trying to figure it out.

Thanks again

Steve

[Fabi280]

What's the average speed for a file transfer?
Wouldn't using nginx speed it a bit up?

[hackitbuildit]

The file transfer speed is about 5-10 seconds to upload a 10MB mp3 file and about 3 Minutes to upload a 350MB video file.

Using nginx might speed it a bit but it seems to be going at an acceptable speed and I've been using apache for about 12 years so am just more use to it.

[unholythree]

I'm also curious about the pi's performance. Did you test this on the new 512 MB Pi or the older 256 MB?

[hackitbuildit]

Its with the 256MB Pi the performance is good. The thing to point out is I'm the only user of it which means it doesn't have to multi task at any point.