Family Cloud

Since quite some time I have this longing after a solution for storing my personal memories, notes, documents and all kinds of other data in a secure and scalable way. Ideally I would like the data to be replicated in different physical locations while still being accessible on the go. That got me thinking: what is the easiest way to get multiple distinct physical locations without renting space in a data center?

I could just ask my friends and family if they could spare a few square centimeters in a hidden corner of their appartment.

The Box

What if I could just send my parents a little device that they connect to their local network. It would automatically connect to my own device and sync all data. Effectively giving me a simple way to have an offsite backup of all my data. Now thats cool for me but what is in it for my poor family members? Actually they could also use it. By adding more storage we could all share this distributed storage system. Each person would have their own private encrypted workspace. There would be a shared family workspace where we could collaborate on things: share pictures, contacts, notes, calendars. The workspaces would be assigned users so you could even host multiple families or groups on a single network. By setting a maximum replication of the data you could scale the network without requiring insane amounts of storage at each node.

But how?

Networking

All of these nodes should connect in a seemless way without interfering with the local networks or giving access to the general internet. We could build that using an overlay network using wireguard.