Playing with NextCloud

Google, Apple and Microsoft have cloud storage solutions. So does Evernote, Kdrive and other products. The issue with all of these solutions is that they are owned by corporations. They are simple and convenient to use but at the cost of being locked in to an OS in some cases, and to corporate interests.

NextCloud is an open source alternative with hosting solutions that offer people with the choice of choosing between hosting solutions that are as local, or as remote as they want. I could choose between a German and a Dutch hosting solution. I chose [tab.cloud](https://tab.digital/) simply because they offer 8gb rather than 2gb like another solution. You can upgrade to 128 gigabytes, or to a maximum of over 500 gigabytes in the paying tiers.

You can install Nextcloud locally too. I installed it on a raspberry pi but I haven't configured it to make it usable yet but I also installed it on a windows machine via Docker. That was quick and easy to do. I was thinking of playing with NextCloud on Linode but will do some local experimentation first. It seems intuitive and simple to use after several minutes of experimentation. That's how quick and easy it is to get up and running.

The price for Google One is 100 CHF per year for two terabytes, and 120 CHF per year for iCloud with the same amount of storage. The price for theGoodCloud is 240 for one terabyte of data shared with five people. With Linode/Akamai the estimated cost could be 206.88 Dollars per year. The cheapest solution is Kdrive at about 60 CHF per year for two terabytes.

And Finally

Buying two terabytes of storage to keep at home costs from 63 CHF upwards. You could easily setup NextCloud on a Raspberry Pi and plug an external drive to that computer and keep it on 24/7. When you get home you could back up all the photos from that day. You would save on storage costs. One of my biggest frustrations with online storage solutions is that if you want to retrieve your data you need to spend several days downloading the data.

With a solution like NextCloud and the mobile phone app you could setup a local machine to backup all your photos. You would have the tertiary backup online but keep the pictures on your phone, the primary backup in your own home and the tertiary backup online.

I will setup a NextCloud system locally.