Families increasingly rely on centralised cloud platforms to preserve photos, videos, and personal documents. These platforms offer convenience, but they also introduce recurring costs, vendor dependency, and limited control over long-term data ownership. Self-hosted alternatives promise greater sovereignty, yet household deployments often fail to remain usable over time because they demand continuous administration, expose technical complexity to non-technical users, and provide limited support for shared family storage management. This report presents The Family Vault, a device-agnostic reference architecture for a family-owned private media cloud. The architecture combines tiered storage, API-driven operational automation, dynamic quota allocation, and a family-oriented mobile user experience. Rather than treating self-hosting as a one-time installation problem, The Family Vault treats long-term operability as the central design goal. A prototype implementation demonstrates how the reference architecture can be realised using commodity edge hardware, a containerised cloud stack, and a mobile client that exposes media access, quota visibility, family relationships, and activity transparency to household users.
Ramesh et al. (Fri,) studied this question.
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