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Question

Sharing External HD With Colleague Via Internet???

Sep 14, 2015 5:10AM PDT

I have a 1TB drive connected to a spare PC. I have a friend that lives in the same state as I do and we are collaborating on a project.

We were using Google Drive but 8GB is not cutting it as we are saving a lot of HD raw images and videos. I can share my drive easily with anyone in my house, but I do not know how I can share the drive with my friend outside of my home network.

I would actually just like to share only one folder on the drive and he would not have access to anything else. Also I would like to make it so he would have to log in to access the folder, thus keeping anyone else out. I would like to do this for FREE or very cheap but I have a feeling I will need some 3rd party software and have to pay for it. He and I are not opposed to using Ubuntu with setting this up.

Discussion is locked

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Answer
Re: share storage
Sep 14, 2015 5:24AM PDT

Why not pay for more cloud storage at some cloud provider? That seems to be what you need.

Kees

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Re: Re: share storage
Sep 14, 2015 9:27AM PDT

We are in the prototype stage of something and really have no startup cost to pay a monthly fee. I bought the external hard drive because I thought maybe I could set it up so he would have access to a single folder on it.

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Answer
There are too many other solutions.
Sep 14, 2015 10:02AM PDT

Dropbox is nice since well, you know why. You can research alternatives like "my own cloud" on a google search or if your router offers a cloud via your own HDD that could be a cheap exits.

Speeds should be glacial so be sure to sync to the shared drive rather than mapping it to drive letter or direct access. SyncBack and such software can sync to many such shares.

For example if you put this up on a FTP server on router or PC, Syncback could sync it and only update the local to/from share to only what changed.

As there is plenty about sync software titles like Syncback I won't list them all here.

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Re: There are too many other solutions.
Sep 17, 2015 11:30AM PDT

"Dropbox is nice since well, you know why."

I am curious why Dropbox? I used them before on my phone and it quickly ran out of space. They then pestered me to buy more. I could pay for cloud service, but I was looking for a way to use the 2TB storage drive I already purchased.

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I use it and it's very nice.
Sep 18, 2015 7:19AM PDT

When I want another system, it's what I want. If you don't want what it does, then you try other titles.

As to using your own drive, that's where you research "your own cloud." There are now dozens of solutions so I can't guess which you think is best. I shared one that I use besides dropbox.

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just get a hosted account
Sep 21, 2015 5:31PM PDT

at some place like godaddy or another domain registrar.
You buy a domain name for $8-20 and then pay $5 a month for hosting, and get large amounts of storage and bandwidth and can use FTP from file manager for uploading and from that and browsers for downloading files. If you give direct link to a file, then can be downloaded by HTTP in a browser too.



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