Cloud Storage

Not many years ago, cloud based storage was a very hot topic with considerable competition between vendors. Each vendor competed against every other vendor to get as much marketshare as possible, as quickly as possible. Companies would offer vast amounts of storage for free or extremely low monthly or annual fees. Much of that competition has settled and the market is much more stable today.

During those growth years, I changed cloud vendors several times depending upon which had the best deal. It was onerous moving files from one cloud to the next. Worse, because I share large number of huge files for my photography and videography hobbies, I was constantly looking for more space.

I don't share a lot of data at one time, so my bandwidth needs aren't that high, but I do need a lot of storage. And I wanted to ensure that the files I was storing on the cloud were secure. If they disappeared, how would they be restored? I wanted to manage my own cloud.

After a bit of research, I found several cloud storage systems and selected OwnCloud. It was a good system that was not too onerous to install and maintain. It's hardware requirements weren't insane, and it was sufficiently flexible that I could configure it so that it would suit my needs. Even better, it has multiple extremely useful facilities.

Now, several years later, OwnCloud's developers decided to move the product into large enterprises. As a result, they introduced a more substantial offering, OwnCloud Infinity Scale. They still offer the legacy product, OwnCloud version 10, but seem to be de-prioritizing the development of the product.

Some of the developers of OwnCloud left the organization in 2016 and forked the product to create Nextcloud. I wanted to try Nextcloud, but ... inertia. Now that I wanted to do a major upgrade of my cloud storage system, moving to Nextcloud was the obvious choice. 

Setup is pretty much straight out of the book. Setup is little more than following the steps in the setup guide of the Admin Manual and some good web server practices. I did deviate a little. My file store is pointed to a RAID 5 disk storage array, which gives me the space I need and some level of protection against disk drive failure.

Two of wonderful side benefits of OwnCloud and Nextcloud are their integrated Contact manager and Calendar management tools. They are not active by default, but are easy to add to the system. I use both the Calendar and the Contact extensions, which work very well. Even better, they also act as CalDAV and CardDAV servers. Therefore, the contacts and calendars on my Mac and Linux desktop computers, and on my iPhone and iPad are automatically synchronized. I like it! The benefit of having your calendar and contact lists synchronized across all of your devices, is extremely handy.

Nextcloud also has an easy to implement integration to Collabora On Line, which is an open-source on-line office suite based on Libre Office. Think of it as somewhat like Microsoft Office 365, but without the subscription fee, or Google Docs, but without Google reading all of your materials. I've not yet installed the Collabora system, but it is on my list of to-dos.