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?