Unorthodox Computer Challenge : Storage Woes

My last 48 hours can be summed up in as little as 2 words “Storage Woes”. Between Microsoft announcing that they will be killing OneDrive Storage Plans greater than 1TB and the fact that the Vensmile Mini PC seems to have one of the slowest eMMC storage modules around, I am really feeling the pressure. To make matters worse, my Cloud Storage space is a mess of old, outdated and duplicate files scattered among a few hundred GB of important files.

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After hearing the news about OneDrive, I took a few hours to shake my fist in the air and formulate a migration plan to get off of the platform before the rush of users in 2016 start at the last moment. My plan is to use a hybrid solution of my home NAS, Google Drive and a massive OwnCloud instance. The OwnCloud instance will become my primary storage solution with Google Drive as a backup. All data on OwnCloud will be replicated down to my local NAS for backup and offline access when needed. I will admit that the solution is a bit overengineered for the typical user however I have a lot of important data that I wish to preserve and as I am in an area that gets hit with Hurricanes, I cannot rely solely on on-site storage.

This migration is complicated a bit by a slow internet connection, but I have learned to work around this by simply expecting tasks to take longer (even days) and coming up with a few creative/jerry-rigged solutions.

Normally that would be the end of the problem, however, this migration could not have happened during a worse time – while I am doing the Unorthodox Computer Challenge. Having access to fast, local storage would have made this migration a billion times easier. To further complicate the issue, as many of the devices I will be using for the Unorthodox Computer Challenge will have less than 64 GB of built-in storage and the fact that I will be switching devices 10 times over the next few months, I planned to make heavy use of Cloud Storage. Needless to say, I need to act fast or the next few months will be a lot more painful than I anticipated (keep in mind, I anticipated some pain).

Last night, I set up my new OwnCloud Server with 4 TB of storage to allow me to migrate all of my OneDrive content into its new home. This task would normally only take me a few minutes if I had my System 76 laptop however as I was limited to using the Vensmile Windows 10 Mini Box, It took me over 90 minutes. Fortunately, the setup went very well and the new OwnCloud works perfectly. As downloading content to the Vensmile Mini PC was simply out of the question due to the limited local storage and slower internet, I decided to use Storage Made Easy’s cloud service to do the migration in small chunks.

Speaking of the Vensmile – I am running out of storage at a record pace. I only have about 8 GB of free space. I need to free up some space quickly as I plan to do a Gaming segment later this week using the Vensmile to play some games such as Starcraft and Minecraft.