I think (hope) that there is a distinction that can arise between "cloud" applications and services and "offsite" or "online" applications.

If you plug together a handful of off the shelf Amazon components, slap a label on it, and open the doors, perhaps that is rightly called a "cloud" service ... the end provider has no accountability to you (or your users) and you have no idea what's going on behind the curtain. It's all just magic happening many layers of abstraction away.

But if you build systems, own the platform, write the architecture and provide something that you understand and have accountability for, end to end, I think it can satisfy the skeptics (of which I am one).

So in this case, the researcher that can't store the documents on dropbox ... hopefully he could upload them with duplicity to an online storage platform that was built and run like this[1].

And I hope that this would be possible because such a distinction could be made ...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5638295

This is the niche ownCloud is targeting isn't it?

There are a couple of devices on Kickstarter that are targeting this niche:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/transporterguy/transport...

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/clintgc/space-monkey-tak...

SpaceMonkey stores your data on your home device, and then replicated across other users' devices for redundancy. If you have liability problems using something like Dropbox, SpaceMonkey may not solve them.

(But it's pretty cool. I'm an alpha user.)

BitTorrent Sync would be a good fit for you http://labs.bittorrent.com/experiments/sync.html

Then perhaps Transformer is for you: http://www.filetransporter.com/

While still alpha, BitTorrent Sync looks really promising for this use case.

Isn't that just "security by obscurity"? Your home cloud server is probably more accessible to hackers than an amazon server.

If you're ok with relying on obscurity, you already have it - you are one person among billions on this planet. Who else cares about your photos?

It's not only about protection from hacking, it's often also about protection from access by authorities – in particular American authorities. Non-disclosure agreements, data privacy laws and attorney-client privileges are not compatible are simply not compatible with most hosted services, especially not abroad where your local law cannot protect your local legal obligations.

I think the people here suggesting things like bittorent sync and owncliud missed the commenters request, i. e. a personal cloud that works with all these other services. Owncloud etc are just clunky implementations of drop box that offer less uptime and features. They don't offer slick, out of the box integration with other apps/services

Synology is doing good things in this area. They offer a "private cloud" backup and file-sharing solution, served from a (linux based) NAS, with client programs for Mac, Windows, Android and iOS. I have a home/small office model and I love it.

http://www.synology.com/dsm/home_file_sharing_cloud_station....

I have one of these and I can highly recommend it.

Maximum capacity is 96T, that should be enough for most home servers.