A minimal personal cloud server & client to turn a leftover laptop into local network storage.

• Backend (backend.c): Fast C engine handling file reading/writing and compression using zlib.
• Frontend / Network (homecloud.py): Python socket manager handling TCP connections, routing, and client CLI interface over standard I/O pipes.

Compile the C backend:

# Windows (portable standalone binary, bakes in zlib)
gcc backend.c -o backend.exe -lz -static

# Linux
gcc backend.c -o backend -lz

• Python 3.7+ (built-in standard library only: socket, subprocess, struct, os, sys).
• GCC / Clang (C99+).
• zlib:
  • Linux: Pre-installed on virtually all distributions (libz.so).
  • Windows: To compile, you need zlib installed locally (e.g., via MSYS2 pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-zlib). Adding -static during compilation bakes the library directly into backend.exe, so you don't need to ship zlib1.dll to other computers.

Start server on laptop:

python homecloud.py server ./cloud 7878

Connect client from another machine:

python homecloud.py client <laptop_ip> 7878

i've had this laptop for a pretty long while,and its specs as a laptop are pretty bad. it has intengrated graphics and only 8gb ram & 500GB space. But - for something like a server/cloud, that is a lot more than enough.
so, i took the knowledge i learnt in magshimim & did some homework on libs and decided to make it myself, instead of vibecoding(only skeleton and starting documentation is, rest is manually coded.) or looking for something that already exists.