So the last month or so I have started the slow transition of deGoogling and other efforts… its scary because I’ve been using Google for 20 years. But I have jumped into the deep end with NextCloud and I cannot believe this is free. My only wish is that it was easier so that everyone could do it. It’s pretty complicated but at the same time, so worth it to learn how!
If you have a web server and any experience managing hosted tools like Wordpress at all I highly recommend NextCloud. It’s free software (you’d pay for hosting though…) and can replace all your Google producs and more: Gmail, Calendar, Tasks, Meet, Docs/Drive, Photos, Keep, Contacts, Google forms, Doodlepoll, Docusign, and more. It’s even got a pretty cool self-hosted maps tool, but I haven’t really played with the viability of replacing Google Maps with that yet. It’s also got a self-hosted password manager, a recipe keeper and bookmarks manager if you want it (and more.)
Self hosing NextCloud has a steep learning curve if you’re a beginner, but you can do it. The support community is pretty responsive and engaged. If you don’t want to do it yourself, there are service providers who will host and support it for you with little effort from you, but that would remove the self-hosted data benefit (although most are data privacy centered).
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I’m going to say this now before anything happens: backup, backup, and backup. Make multiple copies, store them different places. Please dear god backup your data, because no one else will.
Then make sure you can actually restore the data.
I must be stupid, could you elaborate?
Just went thru a big (unrelated) homelab restore
I just mean don’t rely on backups that you haven’t proven you can restore from. Practice doing a restore when you are happy with your solution to make sure it works.
The only thing worse than losing all your data because you did’t back it up is losing all your data because you didn’t make sure your backup was restorable.
Thanks so much
Too many people complain that nextcloud has too many functions.
I’ve run Nextcloud several ways, the smoothest, easiest and most powerful being the official image by Hanssen IT. Run that in a VM and use their setup/update scripts to do all the hard work. I highly recommend.
Welcome to the fold.
Been running nextcloud for 8+ years. Love the auto upload and bookmark sharing apps.
The contacts and calendar apps support DAV…I use DAVx on android to sync contacts and calendar to nextcloud …haven’t sync’d to Google. Grab it from FDroid. I have an article on my web blob explaining how to do it.
Remember to backup your cloud data and secure your web portal or run over private vpn.
Oh and go find the php updater script…it’s a life saver.
My Nextcloud AIO :)
