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.
Hey, using your old phone as a server with Termux and Nextcloud is a dope idea! Your phone should handle the basics just fine. Just make sure you’ve got a solid internet connection and watch out for battery drain since running a server can suck up a lot of juice.
For better self-hosting vibes, check out some software that can help you manage your cloud storage. I found a site that's cool for keeping track of costs for cloud services, helping you figure out what works best for you. You can find here saas subscription management, so you can make smart choices and keep things affordable, especially if you wanna expand later!
Especially in these days, with all this data collection going on, why in the heck, would anyone want to store their files on somebody else's computer? I've never once understood cloud storage, people blindingly putting files on a stranger's computer/data center, and expecting their data not to get stolen, or used for ill gotten gains.
I was just talking about on another post, how back in the 90's and earlier, it was understandable why we were zipping up our files. (Before cloud storage was a thing for you GenZ kids out there) Storage drives were really expensive, and carried so little storage for what you got for your money, so we were zipping up files.
Having said that, in modern day however, storage drives are so much cheaper then they used to be. You can buy 1TB for less then 100 bucks now, and I am talking about more expensive NVME drives too. And most computer's today come with 2-NVME slots, (unless its a super slim notebook) plus you can hookup a 3rd external SSD to a 20GBPS USB 3.1 port.
The way we actually do it in modern day, if you need mass storage, thats what a NAS box is for. You put 4TB of storage or more into a NAS box, set it up on your network, that is how you do self storage on the network, that doesn't involve this internet cloud based storage nonsense.
If you want my best advice for keeping your data safe, keep it on your own home or company network, don't use cloud storage.
The problem with self-hosting storage is that if you intend to access it from off your own LAN, you also need to maintain an open port on your network and are responsible for your own security. The router I use makes it easy to see that I'm fairly constantly being scanned. An open port would mean that if I haven't secured things properly, I've potentially left an exploitable opening. This is how you get things like baby monitors that are compromised, as have turned up in the news several times. Aside from security, if your ISP is a cable company, your upstream is likely way worse than your downstream, so pulling large files you're hosting on your own LAN will be comparatively slow.
I use Proton Drive for my cloud storage, because encryption is end to end. They can't access my files. I'll agree with you though that using most cloud storage is asking for privacy issues, and I don't touch Google Drive anymore and migrated out of OneDrive around the time I switched to Linux.
More to the original point of this thread: For my network storage, I have a 12 TB HDD attached to my router via USB. It functions like a SMB share, and I use it for large files I want to keep but won't regularly use, such as ISOs, or transferring files from one PC to another. I could configure it for external access, but have not for the reasons I gave above.
While that's a way to do it if what you need is lots of storage, my use case is the exact opposite to the point that even onedrive's free 5 GB could be enough for me
As a university student, document files with the notes I take in class are mainly what I need to save, so pretty light files. The thing is that I take those notes from an old tablet for the sake of battery life (can go up to 3 days without charging, but those 2 gb of ram can fully softlock the system if a website is heavy enough). Then, studying and homework is done on a laptop when I'm not at home and, when I'm finally at home, I use the desktop PC because of the nicer 1080p screen (laptop is set to 720p to save battery and reduce gpu temps)
So... same file accessed from 3 different devices, each time on different locations. One option would be using an external hard drive, but that would make portability a bit uncomfortable, not to point out my tablet's micro-usb port, while it works fine for charging, it's starting to fail for data transfer (and my usb-a to micro-usb adapter stopped working as well).
Manually connecting each device wired or wirelessly to move files between them when I need them are something I tried at some point, but it's an incredibly unorganized way of doing it and sometimes you may have an outdated version of a file on a device and not remember that the version with more information added was on another device. It can be a mess.
The concept of "cloud" storage -even without the cloud- is exactly the ideal for my use case: one single device where everything is and all the other devices connect to it to modify and save files, while also retaining "offline" copies just in case the "cloud" goes down (broken, powered off, maintenance with updates, etc.). It doesn't need to be a 4 TB external HDD/SSD, it certainly can't be a NAS at home (I don't trust leaving devices powered on while I'm not there to monitor them, and even less if their whole purpose is to be connected to the internet), but a phone with internetless hotspot that I manually turn on when I need to use the files on it and off when I don't anymore and I carry it with me in my pocket seems like the best case scenario for a student who tries to avoid the cloud.
That being said, right now I am having to use onedrive because nextcloud setup in the phone kept failing at some point, I couldn't figure out workarounds when I had the time and now I don't have much free time and I need it to just work. But as soon as I can figure out the problem or find an alternative tool that does what I'm trying to achieve, onedrive will be left wondering why all the files on my account have suddenly been deleted.
I've finally found a definitive solution for my specific use case that works and works well. I've given detailed instructions as to how to use it here:
But to keep it short: I've found a program called Syncthing that does just that: replace the "cloud" pc with your own pc/phone, keeping all files within one folder available on all your devices and ONLY on your devices, not on any big corporation's data centers.
Not sure which devices you're using, but FYI, just two weeks ago Syncthing announced that it's retiring its Android app due in large part to Google Play's policies.
