Like many, I am moving away from the big conglomerates for my tech products. The next step is to set up a cloud storage and backup solution. My ideal outcome is to have a backup of all my photos/music/data on a zero knowledge cloud storage, as well as a local copy for redundancy.
Is this something I could achieve with OpenWRT, or do I need to think about running a small server on the network to set something like this up? Or am I approaching this in the wrong way and I should try a different solution?
It'd be blurring a few boundaries I think. OpenWRT will run on x86, so you could repurpose something like a compact media server with fast disk access as your network device by plugging in network cards / devices. Conversely a suitably beefy network device could host plugged in disks - probably on USB rather than SATA / SCSI. Overall I think you'd end up with a functional but inelegant looking setup.
The alternative of OpenWRT on a compact router with cable connection to separate NAS device that can do cloud backup would be similar in physical appearance but allow each piece to focus on its core task.
You also need to make sure each type of storage is doing what you want. In a "zero trust", authenticated user / device model you'd be able to consume the data wherever you were without firstly connecting "securely" to the network hosting it via physical port, wifi or VPN. So for example the right software could stream a file directly from Microsoft OneDrive. New / updated files are also avialbale in near-real time.
Having backups in the Cloud of a NAS that you can restore to a local device don't give you that.
Most file based Cloud stores (eg OneDrive again) will let you have a near-real time distribution to multiple client devices, giving you the equivalent of one or more backups.
If you're trying to protect against specific threats like accidental mass deletion, cryptoware, etc then it needs a level of behaviour above raw storage to provide that, such as N version recovery, mass file change tripwires, etc. You'll find features for that in the commercial cloud services that do that which might be difficult to reliably (as in know it will work when you need it!) replicate.
OpenWRT is aimed for routing, not for general purpose server. Of course u must have a home server and not use ur router for such things, independent of its OS.
I use CrashPlan for a few years and like it. But it's for backup, not cloud storage.
Thanks for all the replies. Seems like I should keep OpenWRT doing what it does best and find another solution for this. I'm currently looking at Synology - it doesn't give me the zero knowledge cloud backup (just regular cloud backup), but that might be the tradeoff I make for now.