I'm looking to set up a server of some kind that I can use to store more or less arbitrary files on demand.
While I have quite a bit of programming experience, I have little-to-no experience in the server-space, so I don't really know where I should be getting started/what kind of pitfalls I should be looking out for/what kind of design choices I should be making early on.
In short: I want some system that allows me to take more or less arbitrary files, send them from either my laptop or phone, and have them stored on a drive that I can have lying around somewhere hooked up to some setup. I don't need any automatic backing up, sending files manually is sufficient. The individual files I'll be sending probably won't be exceeding the MB range of sizes. Remotely downloading files from the storage is not an immediate requirement, if I need to retrieve them I can plug directly into the disk. What I want to protect myself against is the "freak accident" type of thing where all the devices I currently have copies of a file on are lost in a fire, while travelling, or something like that.
Does anyone here have any tips for where I should be looking to get started?
With your minimal requirements, a Raspberry rumning stock Rasbian or Armbian, and SSH/SCP commands (and an Android/iPhone SSH/SCP client) could do the trick.
The disadvantages to this approach is you'll have to learn the commands you need for every use case. The advantage to this approach is you'll have to learn the commands you need for every use case, and we would learn a lot of useful stuff.
Source: I used a Pi for this need, before I bought a fancy Network Attached Storage (NAS) device.
Edit: Further pro/con:
Honestly, while being the most complicated approach suggested so far, it seems like what's closest to what I'm looking for! The fact that it's not reliant on any corporation staying alive, and keeps everything simple (or "bare-bones") is attractive. Do you have any pointers for setting up an iPhone SSH client so that I could transfer files to it from an iPhone?