Moving to a Personal Cloud

I have recently been trying to move away from subscription services of all sorts as well as switching to using hardware and software that does not require Windows. I don’t hate Windows, but I am becoming more and more annoyed of the bloat, advertising, pushing toward subscriptions, and other similar directions it has taken over the years. I am not at the point of wanting to totally ditch Windows, but I do not want to be dependent on it. Therefore, I’m looking to settle on software to do what I want while being supported on Linux, Android, Mac, and Windows environments. That way I can move between them as I see fit without too much disruption in what I use them to do.

Luckily, the list of “must have” applications is fairly basic for me, and most of what I use is also available for use on Android devices. This includes things such as word processing and other “office” things, note taking, tasks, and password management. I also like to be able to do things while not connected to the Internet, so browser-based solutions are not an option. However, I want to be able to seamlessly synchronize things across computers and platforms when I am connected. For example, if I am traveling on vacation, I may take a relatively inexpensive Android tablet with me and leave my more expensive Windows laptop at home. Even if I am not connected to the network such as on a flight without WiFi, I want to be able to access and modify notes, write journal entries about my trip, read and respond to emails, and other things. Then, when I am connected to the Internet, have any changes I made be updated and accessible on my home computers.

While looking into software solutions that work on multiple platforms, I realized that the first order of business was to settle on a cloud solution to act as the backbone for other things. This would provide a central place to store data that could then be accessed and managed by multiple applications on multiple computers. At the time, I was mainly using Microsoft OneDrive to store files, notes, tasks, passwords, and some other things. I also used Google to store my calendar and contacts. I had no real complaints with either, and it was nice to know that my data was stored in large, capable data centers with many more resources available for redundancy and backups than I could employ for myself. Also, since my data needs were small, I was able to use their “free” tiers with the caveat that my data was probably being used for their benefit such as advertising and AI training. There was also no guarantee that at some point I might be forced into some sort of subscription model or some agreement unacceptable to me to use their services.

Moving to a self-hosted cloud solution did carry some risks in that things could break in a wide variety of ways. However, I already have a robust backup strategy that includes offsite, cloud storage. That subscription is not one that I see trying to eliminate as it is very important to me. Besides, with my current usage, it costs less than a couple cups of coffee per month to maintain. It also uses open standards which makes it easy for me to switch providers in the future if needed. Backups, however, do not cover outages of the cloud service. But since one of the goals was to be able to continue doing things without any access to the cloud, then synchronize things when that connection was restored (or the servers fixed), my cloud service being unavailable for a while was not a huge deal to me. Finally, the thought of using a self-hosted cloud solution had some appeal in that it gave me more control over how my data was used.

In short, there were a number of risks in taking responsibility of a cloud solution, but I felt that I could manage through even major disasters such as the house burning down without losing major functionality or data. Depending on the incident, I could lose some data, but if my backup strategy kept working as it should, that loss would be limited to up to 24 hours, (and potentially much less given that most of what I was planning to do kept local copies of data on my various devices). Therefore, I decided to give it a try.

After researching self-hosted cloud solutions, I ended up choosing a software offering called Nextcloud. It seemed to be well-supported, actively developed, and a large community providing abilities beyond what the core software offered. Before I fully took the plunge, however, I had to dig into all the other software changes I wanted to do in order to make sure that the various alternatives fit my needs, and were fully supported by Nextcloud. That took a bit of time to do and is still ongoing for some things. However, once I was convinced that Nextcloud would cover the important stuff, I ended up installing and setting it up everywhere I would be using it.

At this point, I have pretty much moved away from Microsoft and Google products. While I still have a Microsoft account as I still use Windows and one of the annoying changes they’ve made recently is requiring a Microsoft account to set up Windows, I also have a Google account because I use Android and need that to access the Google App Store; I’m not interested in using alternatives there. However, I am not really using those accounts for anything else anymore. I even shut down my previous Microsoft account and created a new, fresh one that only (as best as I could anyway) has what is needed to set up and log into a Windows machine. I kept my Google account as-is since it has various purchases I made associated with it, but I removed all the other data such as my contacts and calendar entries. While email is another service for which I pay and do not see replacing with a “free” service, I use the Google account as a backup email address for several things in case my primary email has issues. At some point, I may create a new Google account, re-purchase the few paid Android apps I still use, and take the time to update the backup email address in places where I have one set. However, doing all that did not seem worth the effort at this point.

Separate articles will delve into more details around the software I now use for things such as email, browsing, notes, one time passwords, contacts, calendar, picture editing, word processing and other office tasks, e-books, and more. While I am not looking to move away from Windows, there are not many things left that I would miss by doing so; video editing and some hardware I use for content creation are the main blockers for switching. Also, I have not yet found a laptop that retains its full functionality in Linux while meeting my rather specific requirements for such a device. I am not willing to make compromises in the hardware and form factor just to avoid Windows. Maybe at some point, getting rid of Windows may become more important to me, but if that day comes, then I have already done a lot of the hard work making such a transition much easier.