Seems to be a hardware + software thing.
Here's a comparison on running it on your own hardware vs. theirs: https://github.com/getumbrel/umbrel/wiki/umbrelOS-on-Umbrel-...
They even have install instructions on a linux vm. Pretty cool. Thanks.
Umbrel – Personal Cloud
111–120 of 125 posts
Re: Umbrel – Personal Cloud
#112I'd really love to see an off the shelf distributed FS server in a NUC form factor that you plug in and is largely self-managed. Automatic atomic updates, QR codes to add a server to your swarm, manage it through a browser, client side encryption so a compromised server doesn't mean data exposure. If you want to get fancy, you could have user quotas so you and all your friends set up a single swarm with shared storag…
I've been thinking about building this with friends, in the short term though you could do this today with Garage http://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr
Re: Umbrel – Personal Cloud
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
any recommendations for non-Chinese products ?
Maybe Minisforum? But reviews differ from product to product, they are not consistent. Mac minis are also somewhat popular for home servers.
Is this some sort of new account trolling? Parent specifically asked for non-Chinese products or non- Chinese company.
Re: Umbrel – Personal Cloud
#114A decade of “personal cloud box” attempts has shown that the hard part isn’t the hardware, it’s the long-term social contract. Synology/WD/My Cloud/etc all eventually hit the same wall: once the company pivots or dies, you’re left with a sealed brick that you don’t fully control, holding the most irreplaceable thing you own: your data. If you’re going to charge an Apple-like premium on commodity mini-PC hardware, you…
Hi Umbrel CTO and cofounder here, appreciate the thoughtful feedback.
> how do I keep using this thing in 5–10 years without your cloud, your app store, your updates?
The code is publicly available with a non-commercial restriction. If Umbrel the company disappears it's possible for a community maintained fork to live on. Someone else in this discussion mentioned that the NC clause hurts maintainability due to no future company being able to profit from taking over maintenance. They suggested we add a clause revoking the NC restriction if Umbrel goes out of business. It's a good suggestion and something we'll definitely consider, I think it should be possible.
Regarding apps specifically, we have the concept of "community app stores". Anyone can host their own app store which is just a public git repo that any other user can use by pasting it's url into their web ui once. Community app stores completely bypass our main app store, they don't rely on our infrastructure and will continue working if we disappear. There are already hundreds of community app stores in use:
- https://github.com/getumbrel/umbrel-community-app-store/fork... - https://github.com/search?q=in%3Areadme+sort%3Aupdated+-user...
> automatic off-site backup that isn’t tied to one vendor, painless replacement/restore if the hardware dies
We recently shipped backups baked directly into umbrelOS. You can backup to a local NAS, USB device, or another Umbrel (local or remote). You can restore individual files from hourly/weekly/monthly snapshots, or restore the entire state of your Umbrel onto a fresh device from your backups.
https://x.com/umbrel/status/1970508327479320862
> portable across generic hardware
We currently support running on Raspberry Pi, all amd64 devices, virtual machines and there is unofficial support for running in Docker.
> The interesting opportunity here isn’t selling a fancy N100 box, it’s turning “self-hosted everything” into something your non-technical friend could actually live with.
I completely agree, that's the plan.
Re: Umbrel – Personal Cloud
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
A non-commercial license prevents it from being open-source, and I think already constitutes extremely clear communication about what will happen to users when Umbrel goes bankrupt: they will be stranded, because the license doesn't allow another company to step up and take over maintenance the way an open-source license would.
these companies - if they are so afraid of an OSI approved license - should put certain conditions into their that trigger when they go out of business and the IP gets released
This is a good suggestion, we're taking a look into it.
Re: Umbrel – Personal Cloud
#116Re: Umbrel – Personal Cloud
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
HomeFree must be deployed from another machine with Nix installed. Your mom runs Nix?
No, if you use the installer CD it's a fully UI based install. No command line. No awareness it's even running nix. Administration is through a web UI. It could easily be pre-installed on a device like a NUC and delivered to my mom. Did you read the FAQ? I've got all this running on a branch but it's still rough. Once it's relatively stable it will be merged to master and the home page completely revamped.
No I didn’t read the FAQ, I read the get started section.
> Get a Nix environment set up on your host machine. HomeFree must be deployed from another machine with Nix installed. If you are on NixOS, you should be good to go. If you are on a different distribution of Linux, follow the instructions on how to install and use Nix.
Re: Umbrel – Personal Cloud
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, if you use the installer CD it's a fully UI based install. No command line. No awareness it's even running nix. Administration is through a web UI. It could easily be pre-installed on a device like a NUC and delivered to my mom. Did you read the FAQ? I've got all this running on a branch but it's still rough. Once it's relatively stable it will be merged to master and the home page completely revamped.
No I didn’t read the FAQ, I read the get started section. > Get a Nix environment set up on your host machine. HomeFree must be deployed from another machine with Nix installed. If you are on NixOS, you should be good to go. If you are on a different distribution of Linux, follow the instructions on how to install and use Nix.
Right, the published version is a super early technical preview. As mentioned in my top level comment the installer and admin UI are in a branch and I will update the website once these are released.
Re: Umbrel – Personal Cloud
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
I looked at Cloudron and I'm not sure why I would choose this over just throwing in Proxmox on a box and start clicking stuff in their 'app store'.
Proxmox = infra. You run ops. Cloudron = platform. Ops is mostly done. Clicking apps is easy. Maintaining them isn’t.
Right, but with helper-scripts "ops is mostly done" on Proxmox too. You just point at them and perhaps follow some instructions and that's it.
Re: Umbrel – Personal Cloud
#120Looks like they're selling an N150 based "Mini PC" for $500. You can get a very similar 16GB RAM, 1TB storage Minipc in the same form factor from Amazon for around $260 so looks like you're paying almost twice the price for the NAS-type software?
You are paying more to support the development