My brother and I would like to have some sort of storage space in each others’ systems as an offsite backup thing. Ideally, I’d be able to allocate him 2GB of space that he can drop files in (e.g. a Veracrypt container, perhaps a keepass database, not media files). I don’t want him to be able to access anything else on my network, like my own computers when they’re switched on.
Is Nextcloud a solution? I’d like a sort of Dropbox-equivalent solution where I can just open up a bit of space to him without it being access to anything else. Assume he’s not a malicious actor, but also that I want my stuff to stay private.
Nextcloud is just a web service. How he or anyone can access it is not determined by nextcloud but by the routers, firewalls, vpns and potentially reverse proxies that are routing the traffic to nextcloud.
With the proper configuration of all traffic handling services it will not be possible to access anything other than the intended endpoint i.e. nextcloud.
Within nextcloud any user can only access their own files plus anything that is explicitly shared to them.
Yes, you can make him an account and assign the space you want for that account. He won’t be able to access anything else that isn’t on his account.
Have you looked into Syncthing? It’s super easy to set up without having to configure any ports/proxy/etc.
Another strong vote for Syncthing. It sounds like exactly what you’re looking for and it’s dead simple to set up, low resource (far lighter than next cloud), E2EE and expressly limited as far as what directories you give access to.
Resilio Pro has encrypted folders. You could each have such a folder on eachothers machine.
With nextcloud you can create shared folders. You can give him access to the shared folder via his own account. Anything put inside the shared folder is available to you both. He won’t be able to access the rest of your stuff.
Unless he has admin access to the server itself. But you can also enable encryption.
