I have been considering installing termux and nextcloud on an old phone to use it as a "server" for cloud storage. The phone is old, but not too old: 3 gb ram, 64 gb storage, 1.9 ghz octa-core, android 10. The phone should work fine, as the only reason I stopped using it was because the company we use for calling did an offer and gave a better phone for free. I am not sure how viable my plans to do this are nor if I will even succeed, but I want to give it a try when I have a bit more free time to be less dependent on microsoft with onedrive (as shared storage between computers that aren't always connected to the same network is a must have for me at the moment).
But, with how common I've seen the topic of self-hosting is in the linux community, I got a bit curious: how many of you do it? And those of you who do, how? Do you have a dedicated server, repurposed old pc/laptop, host it in your phone with termux, run it in a container inside your daily-use pc...?
My intention is to use it not just at home, while not reducing portability on the laptop and being compatible with tablet and phone, so a spare HDD/SSD alone wouldn't cover my use cases
But I can see how it could be enough for most people, and I will most likely do just that when I finish university and I have no need to move files between different devices so frequently
I have an old cheap NAS from WD specifically called My Cloud
Are you sure about that? I have My Cloud Home Duo (2 disks), its about 4 years old now and it was a great purchase imo. They did abandon the software, so users wouldn't have to map network drives manually.
These days i just do that myself, remote access works beautifully as well. You may just have an ancient device.
Each has its pros and cons (Word online is limited, but feels like a full-featured document editor when compared to Google Docs), but overall they are both free... at the cost of privacy, which becomes even more of a concern when both of them are developing their own AIs (Microsoft with copilot and recall may be the most heard about one, but Google also has an AI that can actively look at your photos, as long as they are saved on Google Drive, specifically...)
The problem with cloud storage is that they all delete content after account inactivity.
Some people try to remedy this by saying "oh, I'll just pay each month to avoid this problem", but they forget that if for whatever reason they cannot pay and they cannot access their account (e.g imprisonment), then their data will be gone.
For collaboration in small private groups like soccer clubs, cloud storage is practical and easy (who doesn't know Google Docs), but it's exactly when it becomes awful from a privacy perspective: letting Google knows what happens in IRL private groups isn't the brightest idea.
And as opposed to solo cloud storage, you cannot encrypt the data without losing a lot of convenience for other members of the group.
For collaboration in public groups, Google Docs is ok, and maybe the best if you don't consider unrelated alternatives like a full blown wiki.
Even when the information is public, it's still not ideal to go through Google for the privacy of the writers, though (browser fingerprinting, metadata leakage, one Google account that will very probably be used for multiple purposes, etc.).
I would love to do this, or something like NextCloud, but my home Internet speed is just not up to the task. ~16mbps down is perfectly serviceable for anything but large videos or full system backups but 0.5mbps upload is... frustrating, to say the least.
I guess I could pay for a VPS or something to act as my own cloud, but then I'm still relying on an external provider and my data is somewhat more likely to be stolen simply by being on a shared system that might be targeted. But at least it wouldn't be Google, Micosoft, etc.