Nextcloud

Many years ago, if I took photos with a nokia phone I had to sync them via a memory card. With the arrival of the Android Nexus on and the Apple iPhone our digital photography habits changed. With time we would leave our cameras at home, and carry our mobile phones, and photograph paries and hikes with these.

In the process we had two apps to backup. Google Photos and iPhoto. Both of these were optimal for whether we were on iOS or Android. For a while this was fine because they automatically backed up to our computers. With time though, the backup was more and more cloud centric, to the point where our photos were now either on iCloud or Google Photos.

I grew up in the eighties, and 90s, and so computing, open source software and the world wide web grew up with me. In that time we went from going to magazine shops to buy mags, and cd shops to buy CDs, and book shops to buy books. We also took photos on rolls of films and then took those rolls to La Combe or the Garden Centre to have the films processed, and then we put them in albums.

Yesterday when I tried to migrate nextcloud between two locations I used one that I installed from scratch and when I got to another network I was unable to use it. In the evening when I got home I re-installed Nextcloud but this time I used the NextcloudPi package, rather than installing it myself. I tested sudo raspi-config and went to change the SSID. When I saw that I could do this I decided that it was safe for another experiment this morning.

Two days ago I went for a longer walk than usual. I walked along roads rather than along the narrow agricultural roads I normally use. I wanted to avoid crowds and dog walkers. The thing about solitude is that it’s enjoyable when you are not reminded that you are alone.

Today I will also have to try to avoid people. Some might be really happy for good weather, but not me. Good weather means that the reminder that others are not lonely is brought home. I go on walks to listen to podcasts and get some exercise. That little walk I went up was so good for my health that I had 18 PAI as a result of that single walk.

Setting up a drive to be available via Samba is a relatively simple thing to do. The drawback is that you have files that are as organised as the media asset manager. It can be quite chaotic unless you have someone trained as a media asset manager, archivist, or other, to help order photos videos and more. To some degree Nextcloud is just as disorganised, initially.

I have spent more than five minutes experimenting with Nextcloud through several iterations and I have finally set things up as I want them. I have Nextcloud running on a Raspberry Pi 8GB. I chose this device because it’s the highest spec pi available at the moment without months of waiting. I could have used an HP Elite Book from several years ago but I want a machine that can be on permanently.

Yesterday I installed Nextcloud on two devices, a raspberry Pi and an HP Elite book and I could see a clear difference between the two machines. The HP is a laptop on which I installed a minimal version of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and I installed a similar version of Ubuntu on the Raspberry Pi.

Fast on the HP Elite Book

I believe I used Snap to install Nextcloud and then went to the web interface to configure it automatically by simply creating a user. Within seconds the system was up and running and I was able to upload images, create directories and more. It worked well.

Setting up a Raspberry Pi 4 with 2gb of memory to work as a Nextcloud server is quite easy. Download the right ISO from nextcloudpi.com, flash it, put the card into your pi device and after two or three more steps you have a local machine running Pi but you still need to setup port forwarding, open a UPnP port to access the server externally and other steps.

The simpler solution is to download the Nextcloud app on your phone, as well as for the desktop/laptop that you’re using. I set it up so that any picture I take is automatically synced to a server in Holland. As soon as I take a picture it syncs to the cloud. The images are then synced from the cloud to my local machine, and from there I can archive them either to an external hard drive or another local Nextcloud instance. Once the images are synced I can remove them from the mobile phone, saving money, and reducing the need for an expensive higher capacity phone.

Nextcloud is an open source file sharing solution that has iOS, MacOS, Android, Windows and Linux apps. You can install it via a docker container, natively or via a number of other solutions. For my experiment I installed via Docker on Windows but haven’t done anything with it, and with Nextcloudpi. The latter is an ISO image that you can download and install to an SD card using the Raspberry Pi Imager.

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 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.