NAS Sync Android

Have a Raspberry Pi lying at home gathering dust? Buy a cheap SSD and turn it into a home google cloud!

Open Media Vault turns your Rasperry PI (or any Debian Linux device, so old laptops can also be used here) into a fully functioning Network Attached Storage device. This means you can store and access files from any device on your home network.

I initially wanted to try this for work purposes - I switch between Windows and Mac for mobile development and after watching too much Wolfgang thought it would be great if I didn’t have to clone every repo twice on each computer and be able to pick up local git branches no matter where I started the work. However I found that using a network drive with git and editors is quite slow and problematic so this efficiency dream has been put to bed for now.

Then the QNAP Ransomware Attack happened. I thought - why should I backup all my personal photos in some remote server with limited storage and pay for this service when there’s a perfectly good 500gb drive sitting 2 meters away from me? The main limitation is I could only sync my phone when at home (obviously not wanting to expose the NAS to the internet) but that seemed perfect for my use case. OMV even supports reduntant backup drives if I wanted an even more robust solution in the future. I got to work.

I decided on a simple interface that fit my needs

• A way to create a mapping between a phone folder and a NAS folder
• Authentication settings for the NAS (SMB protocol)
• A way to manually sync the files from the app or have them automatically sync in the background every 12 hours

The SMBJ library done a lot of the heavy lifting in allowing communication between the phone and the network drive - all that was needed was a background service to have a timer to run the sync and upload the files.

You can see the result in this repo

Feel free to fork it and adapt it to your needs.

Happy coding!

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