So the last month or so I have started the slow transition of deGoogling and other efforts… its scary because I’ve been using Google for 20 years. But I have jumped into the deep end with NextCloud and I cannot believe this is free. My only wish is that it was easier so that everyone could do it. It’s pretty complicated but at the same time, so worth it to learn how!
If you have a web server and any experience managing hosted tools like Wordpress at all I highly recommend NextCloud. It’s free software (you’d pay for hosting though…) and can replace all your Google producs and more: Gmail, Calendar, Tasks, Meet, Docs/Drive, Photos, Keep, Contacts, Google forms, Doodlepoll, Docusign, and more. It’s even got a pretty cool self-hosted maps tool, but I haven’t really played with the viability of replacing Google Maps with that yet. It’s also got a self-hosted password manager, a recipe keeper and bookmarks manager if you want it (and more.)
Self hosing NextCloud has a steep learning curve if you’re a beginner, but you can do it. The support community is pretty responsive and engaged. If you don’t want to do it yourself, there are service providers who will host and support it for you with little effort from you, but that would remove the self-hosted data benefit (although most are data privacy centered).
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I’m going to say this now before anything happens: backup, backup, and backup. Make multiple copies, store them different places. Please dear god backup your data, because no one else will.
Had my first need to do a backup last night for my self-hosted VPS. It was a bit sad I had to, but I was glad it was there. Now I’m trying to figure out how to do it for my microPC-turned-mini-server.
I run proxmox on my server, VMs within that. It has an excellent backup service built in (not the proxmox backup server, that’s separate) that you can set a schedule for and it keeps to it. Very customizable, all my backups (tested monthly) have restored fine for the past few years. If you’re looking for something to run your homelab, I highly recommend it.
Then make sure you can actually restore the data.
I must be stupid, could you elaborate?
Just went thru a big (unrelated) homelab restore
I just mean don’t rely on backups that you haven’t proven you can restore from. Practice doing a restore when you are happy with your solution to make sure it works.
The only thing worse than losing all your data because you did’t back it up is losing all your data because you didn’t make sure your backup was restorable.
I’ve been using Nextcloud since it forked from OwnCloud (… and used OwnCloud before that). It’s gone from a VPS, to bare metal on dedicated hosting, and now self hosted as a docker container because we’ve finally got fibre internet.
I’ve got around 6TB or so hosted for my small business, with shared directories for different levels of file access, shared contact lists, shared calendars, and a publicly accessible area for things like email attachments (works with a Thunderbird plugin to automatically host and link large attachments with a password) and uploads from customers (they can only upload, no viewing or deleting).
It’s incredible, and I’ve never had the issues people complain so much about. The worst I ever experienced was using snap and occasionally an automatically updated version simply wouldn’t work… So I’d just roll back to the last version and manually update a few months later when I remembered.
Currently using the Nextcloud AIO docker image which includes Borg backups. They get stored on another disk to Nextcloud, which gets automatically backed up to Crashplan.
I do use nextcloud for my small consultancy team but I dislike it immensely, mostly due to personal preferences.
I think I pretty much just don’t like having one platform that does everything. I want to self host my own cloud, I don’t want to self host a thing that provides a cloud.
Additionally, and this really is just a personal preference, I dislike php projects almost as much as Java.
Primarily I use nextcloud’s file sync. This aspect is IMO extremely well implemented. It seems to work very reliably.
We do use contacts and calendars. If there were good alternatives I would switch to them but sabreDav et al lacks a good UI. I’m aware you can disable this functionality in nextcloud.
Anything else that can potentially be integrated is better hosted separately IMO.
It’s definitely a bit of a behemoth, and the dated php codebase doesn’t really help either. I set up OpenCloud last week and aside from the struggle getting it working with a single compose and Authentik for OIDC, it’s been exactly what I’ve been looking for. Simpler, faster, and only does the things I need it to do.
I’m also eyeing at oxicloud that uses rust, haven’t tried yet, and it’s still in development for extra features
I don’t remember if it was next or owncloud, but one of them was making a rewrite in go. I’m I’m no rush to jump into it, but keep a eye on it.
Owncloud had a rewrite called oCIS (Owncloud Infinite Scale). Then it was bought by Kiteworks. Then many of the core devs switched to a new product/company called Opencloud. There’s been quite some history over the past few years
I’ve been using it for many years (since 2017ish) and it’s awesome for my small group. We don’t use fancy stuff, just sharing internal files and external links.
I’ve been using it with NextcloudPi and recently switched to YunoHost and it’s way better. If you have a small server and not much technical knowledge, you should check it.
Welcome to the fold.
Been running nextcloud for 8+ years. Love the auto upload and bookmark sharing apps.
The contacts and calendar apps support DAV…I use DAVx on android to sync contacts and calendar to nextcloud …haven’t sync’d to Google. Grab it from FDroid. I have an article on my web blob explaining how to do it.
Remember to backup your cloud data and secure your web portal or run over private vpn.
Oh and go find the php updater script…it’s a life saver.
The RSS reader is pretty good too!
