Java API - Cloud Service

I hope many people already know about the Dropbox Cloud Service for storing and syncing files across various clients. I am little hesitant using a third party serv开发者_如何学运维ice to store my personal files.

I am trying to build a personal cloud storage using my 2TB Hard Drive. I guess I am looking for pointers on where to start, which APIs to use [preferably JAVA and J2EE], security, risks?

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First, I would highly recommend getting over your paranoia; chances are extremely slim that Dropbox employees are going to spend their lunch hour looking at your photos or whatever. Literally millions of people store their stuff on Dropbox and nobody's had their privacy violated.

That said, Dropbox is based on Amazon S3, which (since I assume you trust Amazon just as much as you trust Dropbox) has an open source clone that you can run yourself. Take a look at Eucalyptus. Since you specifically brought up Java, I'll point out that the excellent AWS SDK for Java works just as well on Eucalyptus' S3 stores as on Amazon's.

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How is it Cloud storage if it's on your 2TB hard drive? Why do you think your own service will be more secure when accessible through the internet then a service run by people who specialized in doing it. I guess Amazon has probably more experience than anybody else in terms of HTTP accessible file storage (S3).

If you want to make sure nobody can look at your stuff I suggest you look into encrypting it before saving it into S3. That would make it harder to access on the client side, because you always need the right tools to do the encryption stuff but that is the price you'd have to pay.