Setting up your own Nextcloud instance to get off of Google

Yes, I'm also using Hetzner and have not run into any limits in what plugins you can install and use yet. They used to call 'storage share' just 'Nextcloud', but moved it to the new name for licensing reasons.

I don't know what type of hardware they're running their Nextcloud instances on, but I've been using calendar/contacts and public file sharing (since Firefox Send went down) on the cheapest plan for a while now and it's fine. I also dabbled a bit in using Nextcloud's maps, video calling, bookmarks and rss reader applications and it all works OK, although I didn't stick to them because they're not the most rich in features. I had to Hetzner email support a few times and got a helpful reply within 1-2 work days, sometimes quicker, which I thought was fine.

>The one thing really keeping me from getting off Google is YouTube. For everything else there are good alternatives. But YouTube really is the only viable player in the online video game.

The thing I hate most is ads. And YouTube (unless you pay them) gets ever more aggressive with showing ads.

The pre-roll ads are bad enough, but interrupting a playing video with a couple of ads (as happened to me the other day) is way beyond the pale.

I guess I need to take a closer look at integrating youtube-dl into my Mythtv environment and otherwise just ignore YT (as I do all of Google's other herding tools).

Sandstorm was a neat idea, but unfortunately it seems like it is nearly dead: https://sandstorm.io/news/2019-09-15-shutting-down-oasis

> As much as I love Sandstorm, it’s hard to come home from my successful day job to work on an unsuccessful side project. And so, I have been spending less and less time on Sandstorm. I still push updates every month to keep the dependencies fresh, but hadn’t worked on any new features in about a year and a half before adding mass transfers recently.

> Meanwhile, without leadership, the community has mostly disbanded. The only app that gets regular updates anymore is Wekan, thanks to its maintainer Lauri “xet7” Ojansivu. Jake Weisz heroically continues to carry the Sandstorm flag, reviewing app submissions (mostly from Lauri), replying to questions and bug reports, and advocating Sandstorm around the internet. A couple others lurk on the mailing list and IRC. Most people have moved on.

> Almost all the app packages are from 2015-2016; many of those apps have had significant updates in their standalone versions since then which are missing on Sandstorm.

Have you considered using the unattended-upgrades package?

Does anybody have a good recommendation for an automated Gmail backup? I am happy using Gmail for now, I just want my own copy of all of my emails that I can search and read - offline if necessary.

I tried to use Nextcloud's email app to backup my gmail, but after sending it up I realized that it is just an alternate interface to access email on Google's server, not a proper backup solution. (It only supports IMAP, not POP3.)

If I can't find a better solution, I may just set up Thunderbird and put it and POP3 mode, but I'd really prefer something that could sit on a server and run automatically without me having to touch it.

(For what it's worth, I ended up keeping my Nextcloud server set up because I found that I really like the notes app. I also have it doing a daily backup of my contacts from my phone and it's replaced Dropbox for small file storage. I already had my photos backing up to a Plex instance on the same server, or else I would probably be using the photo backup feature as well. )