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Setting up your own Nextcloud instance to get off of Google

kiramclean.com

171–180 of 180 posts

Re: Setting up your own Nextcloud instance to get off of Google

#171

I use Nextcloud for the calendar, the to-do deck and to access my Samba shares over HTTPS. That said, I would never put anything important on it. I had at least 5 upgrades in the past 2 years result in total failure, with an unrecoverable instance and corrupted DB.

Less than 1 year and 3 "there goes my evening" issues so far, one which resulted in data loss.

Re: Setting up your own Nextcloud instance to get off of Google

#172
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I'm a little worried about the maintenance burden, tbh. I'm not actually a linux/sysadmin type person, but I was pretty keen to achieve my goal of being Google free by 2021 (which I'm happy to announce with this migration that I did :), though I still watch youtube anonymously sometimes). But I'm not sure it'll be the most ideal solution for the long term. I'll see what the maintenance burden actually is like th…

One option which is what I've been doing is just using SFTP. I find that that reduces the maintenance burden to just keeping a machine running and patched. I also set up a read-only web frontend with NGINX's directory indexing + htaccess so I can share files easily.

A client that works really well with SFTP is lftp. It is in most linux distros and is available for mac in brew and in cygwin for windows. It has a mirror subsystem that works nearly like rsync and can support SFTP + chroot. Combine that with rsnapshot for diffs and you can fall back to earlier versions without using a lot of disk space. You can put that rsnapshot location outside of the SFTP chroot so that malicious access can't wreck your data, or just make the directory above your rsnapshots root-only access so regular users in a non chroot environment can't get there.

Re: Setting up your own Nextcloud instance to get off of Google

#173
post #76

Setup nextcloud 2 years ago as part of a FreeNAS install. It runs in a jail and dumps my files to the local, shared filesystem as a result. I also put the nextcloud clients on my phone so that my photos auto-upload to my NAS vs google photos. It's been quite nice to be able to just drop files to it, right click, then share someone a link to those files.

Is this hosted on dynamic IP? How do you handle that so mobile clients can auto-upload to the server?

Non-static IP, all done via dns updates. Never had an issue.

Re: Setting up your own Nextcloud instance to get off of Google

#174

I use Nextcloud for the calendar, the to-do deck and to access my Samba shares over HTTPS. That said, I would never put anything important on it. I had at least 5 upgrades in the past 2 years result in total failure, with an unrecoverable instance and corrupted DB.

I think I've been using it since version 9 when I switched to it from whatever version of ownCloud I had been running some years prior (I'm not sure if their versions were still in sync or not) and I have the exact opposite experience. I have never used anything more stable. Database upgrades are always seamless (I've never had to even touch the db since install) and all I have to do is occasionally add some indices through the CLI when it asks me to. The automatic updater seems to also make some sort of backups and even if it doesn't, a standard mysqldump backup should be enough to restore pretty much everything. It even survived two migrations to new servers.

Re: Setting up your own Nextcloud instance to get off of Google

#175
post #19

I’m a solo person on google enterprise for $20 a month. It sadly cannot be beat. Unlimited storage (almost 40TB) and email is all I care about and it works pretty much flawlessly (besides this weeks outage). I wouldn’t want to have the hassle of running it myself nor the price of storing all that data. So sadly I remain with google.

> Unlimited storage (almost 40TB) Huh? One of those is finite and the other is not.

i am using 40TB out of unlimited. you are right, that was not clear in my comment

Re: Setting up your own Nextcloud instance to get off of Google

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One option which is what I've been doing is just using SFTP. I find that that reduces the maintenance burden to just keeping a machine running and patched. I also set up a read-only web frontend with NGINX's directory indexing + htaccess so I can share files easily.

A client that works really well with SFTP is lftp. It is in most linux distros and is available for mac in brew and in cygwin for windows. It has a mirror subsystem that works nearly like rsync and can support SFTP + chroot. Combine that with rsnapshot for diffs and you can fall back to earlier versions without using a lot of disk space. You can put that rsnapshot location outside of the SFTP chroot so that malicious…

That sounds super nice, I'll have to look into it.

Thanks!

Re: Setting up your own Nextcloud instance to get off of Google

#180
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Putting anything behind a firewall in combination with a VPN can be relatively turn key and self patching without too much effort. Docker wi5 a tool like proxmox can go a very, very long way in a matter of a few days... and provide near identical vps maintainability. Hardware is much more reliable and self monitoring than it used to be.

None of this deals with ransomware

Do you mean you don't know how it could deal with Ransomware? Or that there's no possible way local setups could could deal with Ransomware because you aren't aware of it?

Ransomware attack vectors are often clicking malicious websites, emails, or software opening stuff that is risky.

Keeping you access point patches system patched and browser up to date is a big line of defence, with or without cloud backups. Those identities can be as easily hacked if the weak spot is our computer.. Using browser and email plug-ins to increase security and safety can be helpful too.

One can run pihole locally at home as well and filter out a great deal of trackers that can get hacked.

It's also relatively easy to setup multiple vlans on your local network to separate your devices.

Having multiple current backups of your computer, physically and locallu is also an important defence against ransomware.

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