If you follow the steps as described on extremetech.com you can set up your own personal cloud using free programs and an old PC.
What you need is:
How to make your own personal media cloud using free programs and an old PC
Lifehacker has an article on how to set up a NAS for backups, streaming your media and downloading torrents.
At its most basic, network attached storage, or NAS, is a great way to share files on your local network. But it’s also a perfect solution for backing up your computers, streaming media across your home network, or even torrenting files to a central server. If you have an ageing computer lying around, you can turn it into a NAS for for free with the open-source FreeNAS operating system. Here’s how.
“A network attached storage box is a computer on your network specifically designed to store files. Any computer on the network can access files on a NAS, which makes them great for bigger households, and they’re also nice for when you don’t want to store a bunch of external drives on your desk.
Unlike regular file servers, NAS units are usually built for a specific purpose, like backing up your data or streaming media to other machines. They’re also usually quite low power and low cost, and they don’t require a monitor, mouse or keyboard – once you’ve installed the software, you can configure every aspect of your NAS from a web browser on your other computers.”
Since FreeNAS has mostly enterprise features (“home features” will appear in FreeNAS 8.1), this article deals with FreeNAS 0.7.
Josh Paetzel, IT director at iXsystems and project manager for FreeNAS, left some usefull comments on Facebook with regards to this article: http://www.facebook.com/freebsdnews
John Gillooly gives a quick, no-nonsense guide to the basics, so you can get started creating a home network.
It used to be that home networking was focused on connecting PCs, but the rise of other networked devices over recent years has broadened the appeal a lot. At its heart networking is about sharing data, be it from the internet or from within. Networking can also be simpler than it has ever been before, thanks to a focus on user friendliness in the hardware.
John goes through the following steps:
MaximumPC has a step-by-step article (Cheap and NASty – How to Build an Open Source FreeNAS Server) on how to set up your own FreeNAS NAS server. All this step-by-step with many photographs and suggestions as to the best hardware you’ll need for your FreeNAS server, how to install and configure your server.
If you’ve been wanting to set up your own NAS storage server, this is definitely for you.
Don’t want to pay for Windows Home Server? We show you how FreeNAS lets you create a server for storing, sharing, and streaming all your digital content—for free!
Back in the day, the average nerd household had one or two computers, a printer, and a game console. If you were lucky, you had an Internet connection on one of those computers—forget about the printer; forget about the console. And forget about home networking. But now, the average geek household has a multitude of machines: desktop computers, laptops, netbooks, Wi-Fi-enabled smartphones, and networked game consoles—not to mention terabytes of ripped movies, music, and photos. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a central location where all of those files lived that was accessible to all your computing devices? A place where you could back up all of your computers, host your media files for streaming to your console or other computers, and use as a file share for your whole network? Yes. Yes, it would.
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Five ways the no-cost server software can benefit your home network
1. Storage
Let’s face it: A family’s worth of home movies, music collections, photos, school assignments, and ripped DVDs takes up a lot of room. Rather than keeping all that content scattered among four computers and six external hard drives, centralize! Use FreeNAS as a central repository for your family’s media, so everyone can access it.
2. Media Server
A FreeNAS server isn’t just a place to store your media—it’s also a fully featured media streaming machine in its own right. The built-in Firefly media streamer creates a library in iTunes that anyone on the network can access. And with FUPPES, the open-source UPnP server, you can transcode and stream movies to your networked computers, HTPC, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, or any other UPnP or DLNA-enabled media player. It also streams photos and music!
3. BitTorrent Downloading Machine
Rather than wasting your personal machine’s processor cycles and bandwidth, use your FreeNAS server to automatically download and seed .torrent files. We’ll show you how to set a watch folder so that your NAS will immediately download any torrent it finds there.
4. Web Server
FreeNAS is configured through a web GUI, which means FreeNAS has a built-in web server. You can use FreeNAS to host your own websites—and even access them from outside your home network!
5. Backup Server
Back up all your computers to your NAS box—whether you’re an advanced Unix user and back up using FreeNAS’s built-in rsync support, or you merely point your backup software toward your FreeNAS user folder, a FreeNAS server is a great centralized location for data archives.
“If you have an old PC sitting around it’s surprisingly easy to create a NAS (Network Attached Storage) repository for your media. In this article, I’ll tell you how you can make one for next to nothing…or even less.
If you think NAS boxes are more IT than AV, then it’s time to think again. Blu-ray players, games consoles and digital set-top boxes are more often than not ‘network-enabled’ for access to content stored on a home network. The worlds of IT and consumer electronics are merging”
Home Cinema Choice looks at NAS in general and FreeNAS in particular.
