File sharing advice needed reddit / selfhosted ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Voronko · 2023-09-27 15:40 Hi all, I'm a bit stuck figuring out whats the best way to share my files with friends/family across the globe. My ideal setup would be that shared folders are constantly available/visible in windows explorer (no relogging or connecting to VPNs) and streaming is possible (meaning you dont need to download the complete file to view it). * Currently I have a server with SMB shares that I can easily use myself. If I am to share it with someone over network it already becomes problematic as they have to connect to my VPN (OpenVPN) to see the files. And overall, SBM over network is quite slow, so watching a Full HD family trip video is near impossible. Also, I personally struggle to set up split tunneling so that only SMB share is accessed through VPN. My attempts break everything, so its either everything routed through VPN or no network access to shares. * I have heard that mesh VPNs like tailscale could streamline the process, at least on connecting side but this does not solve the latency issue. * sFTP/FTPS (?) I have never used before - would it be a solution? Could I add an sFTP folder in win. explorer and be able to see pictures preview from my vacation? Or stream video from network location? * Reading around on stuff I encountered MFT and AS2, but at this point I dont really have a good idea what it is and wether it would solve any of my problems. Seems more like enterprise based solutions. * I am not considering popular cloud storage solutions like OneDrive or GDrive as I have TBs of data and keeping monthly subscription will be too expensive. Also makes no sense when I have a perfectly suitable homelab that should be able to accomplish the same. Any advise on whats the best course of action? What have you implemented in your home? Thanks for everyones feedback and ideas! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- cloudswithflaire · 2023-09-27 16:08 Tailscale is built on top of Wireguard, switching away from OpenVPN alone should pretty drastically reduce your latency problems. Alternatively, you could deploy Nextcloud publicly with auth for family members. If you aren’t comfortable with running it on your own public IP, you could look at a Cloudflare tunnel to expose it. There’s a WebDAV built into Nextcloud that can be mounted quite easily with a tool like Rclone or Raidrive. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ithilelda · 2023-09-27 16:36 if you want to mount it in windows explorer and don't like smb+vpn, then webdav is the only way to go afaik. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- adamshand · 2023-09-27 20:21 I haven't used Windows much for a long time, but you used to be able to mount a WebDAV folder in Explorer. Can either use something like Apache or Caddy to provide WebDAV or something fancier like NextCloud or KaraDAV. If the people are you sharing with are able/willing to install software than you could also use something like NextCloud Client or SyncThing. There's also tools like ExpanDrive which will let you mount remote store locally (SFTP, S3 etc).