Personal cloud-like storage solutions are all the rage these days, what with the NSA reading our love letters and all, so desktop-based hard drives with some cloud smarts are a great way to get Dropbox-like performance with your own hardware. That’s where Sherlybox comes in.

Sherlybox, created by the makers of software solution Sher.ly, is a small hard drive that connects to your network and creates a private cloud. You can share the space with others, upload and download files, and offers invite-only access to your data. The 1TB $199 device ($149 without hard drive), looks a little like a space ship and works mostly like a standard NAS.

Rather than requiring a lengthly setup, however, the lets you start up the NAS features with three clicks of a button on the side. It also uses a faster transfer protocol and a standard Raspberry Pi to power the file transfer.

The company is looking for $69,000 and has raised $16,000 so far. The plan is to start shipping in January. Sher.ly was a TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield entrant and was one of the more popular projects on stage.

It’s an interesting project and could be a nice solution for small business and home office storage. There are obviously other ways to do this – Buffalo makes Cloudstor, which works well – but this one is a bit more compact and nicely designed. It will be interesting to see the final unit.