With the demand for an on-premise alternative to cloud storage services like Dropbox – a demand strongly articulated by both researchers and students, even back in 2011 long before the Edward Snowden NSA disclosures – things were different. This field was not covered yet, and here, the creation of an inter-university private cloud made perfect sense. So in Spring 2012, the council of university IT managers in NRW (ARNW) started a project for an inter-university sync & share cloud storage service and the IT center of Münster University (ZIV) was designated as the project lead.