Plex Cloud, allow private storage in the future?

General Discussions
1

Okay, so with Plex Cloud allowing us to leave the hardware behind and use a cloud storage such as Amazon, Box etc…

We would be battling another issue, which would be copyright infringement, and yes I’m aware many have discussed this already at great length, and even if you own all your movies, shows and music, placing them on a cloud server can still end up with all that data being removed.

So that could be Terabytes of data lost, and sure we would be fools not to backup all our media, but purchasing a new cloud service to upload all the media again could take days which again that data could be removed and we’d then have to start from scratch re-uploading yet again.

So what about a private storage? being able to link our own dedicated servers to Plex Cloud would be far more beneficial than using a Cloud Service, and it would be more cost-effective when purchasing dedicated servers since we could focus more on storage than processing power.

All in all, cloud services are still a great choice for Plex Cloud, but also being able to link your own private storage would create a greater peace of mind as well as providing more choice since we could then use alternative methods when it comes to uploading media, which can help save bandwidth for those with limited supply.

I would love to hear other people’s thoughts regarding this.

2

So, perhaps I’m missing something. Is the suggestion that the server be in the cloud but the dataspace resides locally?

I suppose that’s a nice solution for those with a big NAS, wimpy processor and fat upload pipe. For everyone else it’s either useless or redundant. Of course, I may be misunderstanding you.

3

as @mdnitoil said, it would kinda of be redundant imo. You would def need a nice upload speed to be able to handle it, which i am sure most people here do not have unless they are out of the states or have a gigabit connection.

4

I’m not getting this request either. Why would you want local storage but cloud based app. You would intentionally putting a big restriction on the connection between the two.

No matter what happens you would always have to move/stream the file locally to the cloud for every view. So if you were watching something at home you would stream the movie to the cloud to turn around and stream it back to your house. Where’s the gain in this?

If a friend was watching a movie you would still have to stream it from your home to the cloud to your friend. Your still moving the file out of your house either way.

The only reason I could think where this could be useful is if your sharing with a friend and your local ISP blocks or restricts access from members on it’s local network. In that case you can use a VPN to overcome it. You could easily pick up a cheap Virtual machine and use it for nothing but VPN just to relay the info. You could hand out accounts to any friend who needed it.

5

@mdnitoil said:
So, perhaps I’m missing something. Is the suggestion that the server be in the cloud but the dataspace resides locally?

I suppose that’s a nice solution for those with a big NAS, wimpy processor and fat upload pipe. For everyone else it’s either useless or redundant. Of course, I may be misunderstanding you.

I am not really referring to a local server, although that would still be a possibility for the reason’s you’ve mentioned, I am however referring to a dedicated server hosted online, it’s one of the main reasons I said: “it would be more cost-effective when purchasing dedicated servers”, come to think of it, it doesn’t have to be a dedicated server, it could just as easily be a VPS.

Being able to purchase a cheap server with a low-end processor but large storage would be more cost-effective than renting one with a high-end processor.

I’m mainly suggesting variety, being able to use your own dedicated server with plex cloud means those with limited bandwidth or low upload speeds don’t have to worry because not only would streaming to other users they share their library with, be handled by plex cloud and the dedicated server, but their media would be more secure and they could easily set-up Torrents or Usenet to obtain the media they want, obviously for legitimate purposes they’d only use those services to obtain content they already physically own, that way they don’t have to upload from their own network saving bandwidth and time.

Now this isn’t going to be suitable for everyone, I don’t expect it to be since (1) not everyone could afford a dedicated/virtual server and (2) not everyone has unlimited bandwidth with high upload speeds, but for those who can afford it, it would provide more data security for less the cost of running their very own dedicated plex server.

At the moment we have the following capabilities:

  1. Dedicated Plex Server
  • It’s secure but can be pricey.
  1. Plex Cloud with Cloud Storage
  • Not really secure since the company can delete your media and your account at any time under copyright laws, but it’s cheap.
  1. Local Plex Server,
  • Cheap, Secure, but can hurt your bandwidth and is only reliable for local use if your upload speed is slow.

So by providing the ability to connect a dedicated or virtual server to plex cloud, we can cut out the need for high processing power and mainly focus on storage, which would make it cheaper than buying a high-end server for plex and more secure than using a cloud provider.

6

So dedicated hosted storage. Fair enough. I haven’t found a hosting site that can affordably provide the amount of storage I need, but smaller collections could go this way, I suppose.

7

Support for WebDav would be great though, here in the Netherlands we have STACK an excellent free 1TB webdav drive running on a modified Owncloud.

8

1TB is an anemic amount of storage.

9

@mdnitoil said:
So dedicated hosted storage. Fair enough. I haven’t found a hosting site that can affordably provide the amount of storage I need

Bingo. You’ve sort of re-created the wheel/thought-process and come full circle… part of the reason solutions like Plex were created in the first place: a way to serve local media since remote hosting isn’t financially (or legally) practical.

10

@Skullzy said:
At the moment we have the following capabilities:

  1. Dedicated Plex Server
  • It’s secure but can be pricey.
  1. Plex Cloud with Cloud Storage
  • Not really secure since the company can delete your media and your account at any time under copyright laws, but it’s cheap.
  1. Local Plex Server,
  • Cheap, Secure, but can hurt your bandwidth and is only reliable for local use if your upload speed is slow.

So by providing the ability to connect a dedicated or virtual server to plex cloud, we can cut out the need for high processing power and mainly focus on storage, which would make it cheaper than buying a high-end server for plex and more secure than using a cloud provider.

I think you are missing an option in your list; purchase a dedicated remote server (or VPS) and then use one of the Cloud Providers (Amazon or Google, or whatever) to store your media. Media would be encrypted before it’s uploaded to the Cloud and your dedicated server would mount that encrypted cloud media so Plex would stream from it.

11

@hthighway said:
I think you are missing an option in your list; purchase a dedicated remote server (or VPS) and then use one of the Cloud Providers (Amazon or Google, or whatever) to store your media. Media would be encrypted before it’s uploaded to the Cloud and your dedicated server would mount that encrypted cloud media so Plex would stream from it.

That would actually be a lot cheaper, since we’re focusing on processing power only and not storage, but I assumed the new plex cloud feature would act just like a normal server online, so the media you put on your cloud would not be encrypted, which would mean, if amazon, google drive etc… noticed you had (for example) every episode of house MD on their server, they would remove it due to copyright, but yes, as long as the media we’re storing on amazon, google+ etc… is encrypted preventing those services from suspecting copyright and removing the files, then that would be cheaper.

Then again if it was being encrypted we wouldn’t need to buy a server because the new plex cloud feature is free, which alleviates the need for our own server.

I’ve set your answer as the answer for this topic, it’s a good addition to my list but we could also include the new plex feature, providing the media files are encrypted.