I’m wondering if anyone else has had an idea like this, or wants to try make it work.
Cloud storage is always kind of a pain, you have zero control over how that data is stored, and have limited access to it, and its expensive and could at any moment increase in price. I don’t have any family or friends in far away places to host things for me and even if they did, they would not be technical enough to help fix problems hundreds or possibly thousands of miles away over the phone.
So, I would love to setup something where we can colocate items for other users. For example if someone wanted an off-site backup, they could just mail me a Raspberry Pi and 16TB disk, and I could have it powered up here at my house, and they could do the same for me. Now you have 16TB of “Cloud storage” you have complete root access to, with zero monthly cost. Better yet, if you have poor internet upload speed, you can just do the first backup over your local network, and THEN ship it. And if you have poor download speed an need your data ASAP, I could just ship it back, etc.
It can be even easier than that for some, I for example have plenty of free space on my second NAS, and plenty of room for more small linux VM’s. I could easily give someone a small VM with an NFS volume mounted
We can also then do things that are really not possible without spending a TON of money on cloud compute. For example if you use Veeam to backup VM’s, you know how much of a pain it is to get it into the cloud because the Scale Out Backup Repository is junk. Well, if you have a second Veeam server somewhere, you can do a simple backup copy. It would be trivial to set this up.
I’ve tried to bring up this idea in the past on reddit, and everyone suddenly becomes a legal expert and says what a bad idea it is. I really don’t see any issues as long as you just use reasonable judgement. Some new user makes a brand new account and 1 post wants you to host something, well maybe don’t do that until you get a feel for the person. Sending lots of secret data to be backed up? Make sure its encrypted. Worried someone could use your internet connection for something bad? Throw them over a VPN. etc
Anyone interested in something like this?