Create your personal cloud with Nextcloud and On My Disk: Q&A with Alexey Volkov

Create your personal cloud with Nextcloud and On My Disk: Q&A with Alexey Volkov

Alexey Volkov is an embedded systems engineer, who holds a MSc (Masters of Science) degree in telecommunications. He founded On My Disk, an instant sharing solution that turns your local drive into a personal cloud. It provides secure access to your local data from the Internet. Volkov will be giving a presentation of their products at the upcoming Nextcloud Conference. We talked to him to learn more about his presentation. If you are interested in NAS, this is a must attend talk.

Can you tell us about the topic of your talk?
Actually it will be our product pre-release presentation, it is the right time and the right place to get feedback before pushing things to production.

Who should be attending your talk and why?
Everyone who likes the idea of home NAS as user data storage available in Nextcloud.

Can you elaborate a bit on what is “On My Disk Connector” and who is the target audience (or customer)? ?

On My Disk is a technology which allows user to share files directly from the local drive. Nextcloud server is just a gateway in this scheme. All you need is a tiny backend running somewhere – on your home PC, office workstation or file server. These backends create a virtual file system spread across your devices, seen as normal local file system by the Nextcloud server, while the server itself has no data storage at all.

Communication protocol was designed from scratch with the security and usability in mind. It requires no VPN, static IP-s or port forwarding, which makes it easy to use by the ordinary people not familiar with all this technical stuff.
The problem is that most of such people have the habit to switch off their home computers when they leave. In this case they do not see their «cloud» online and get disappointed in the whole idea. So we decided to move our backend from the desktop to the tiny device connected to the router. Then the external drive connected to this device remains online when you shutdown your PC or laptop. After playing around with Raspberries and Bananas, we decided that we could make better, and after 10 months of development we got our Connector.
 
What value does it bring to Nextcloud users?
Connector is an affordable plug-and-play device which can turn any external drive into «cloud storage» available in Nextcloud. We believe this technology can potentially extend the use of Nextcloud to consumer segment, making Nextcloud interesting for telecoms, service providers and CE vendors, while respecting the Nextcloud’s mission of protecting the user’s privacy.

Are there any competitors of the product, and if yes,what makes this connector better?
As far as I know, only Lima has a similar plug-and-play cloud storage backend. But they do not have such a great web frontend like Nextcloud yet 🙂 Also, we have eSATA interface, while the most of single-board computers are equipped with USB 2.0.