I currently have the following services which I’d like to migrate elsewhere:
OneDrive
Google Drive
Google Photos (some photos doubled in OneDrive, too, but I will just delete those)
Bitwarden (potenitally)
Google Calendar (but may use the calendar at Mailbox.org)
I keep searching for solutions and I keep coming back to Nextcloud. On the one hand, it seems like it’s too big and too complex (even Nextcloud’s website defaults to business version and talks about collaboration), but on the other hand it seems modular and has all I need (Files + Virtual Files, Photos / Memories, Calendar and more).
I may one day want to self-host at home, but this is not the day yet, especially with the ridiculous storage prices. I think I’d rather go the cloud route first, but would like to have an option of switching to another provider or taking everything home.
I understand that with a VPS that’s a no-brainer because it’s essentially a rented virtualized server. But what about the Storage Share? What is easy to take out and what is difficult to take out? I guess files and photos would be as easy as downloading them to my machine (for example via SFTP, rsync, etc. – I’m on Linux). What about Calendar, if I used that? CalDAV, I guess, and sync to another calendar?
On one hand, using the VPS is a good learning experience, but also more prone to errors on my part. But I am not limited to only Nextcloud, I can spin up other services (for example Immich or even Vaultwarden), especially if I use Docker containers. But VPS will be more expensive, especially if I keep adding services.
Managed Nextcloud is easy to set up and there’s virtually no maintenance apart from installing some apps and managing my data. But I am limited to only what Hetzner offers and it may be troublesome to move away.
What am I missing?
From what I understand, Hetzner actually does a lot of horrible censorship. I personally think you’re better of finding a separate alternative that doesn’t censor as hard as Hetzner does.
My experience: I started hosting some other services on a hetzner VPS, and then also threw in Nextcloud later. Nextcloud was a bit annoying to set up, but mostly because I really wanted to use rootless podman. I imagine a more official way would be easier. It works like a charm now. I have only two users, so mileage may vary.
Most of my data is outside of Nextcloud and it’s photos and videos, so I ran out of internal storage on the VPS quickly. I’m using a Hetzner storage box now (though they did just increase the price of those…).
I use the hetzner backup as local. The offsite one is a scaleway s3 via restic, I wanted it to be completely unrelated, just in case Hetzner decide to terminate my account or something.
May I ask which Hetzner VPS did you choose? I wonder if the Cost-Optimized ones are sufficient. I would be using it with max 2 users, same as you.
I’m on CAX11.
Thanks!
Managed Nextcloud is definitely easier than hosting it your own. I bet they also have the hardware to guarantee good performance. With any luck Hetzner also offers AI features like face recognition and automated tagging.
But don’t go in there expecting a fully fledged Google Photos alternative. Even when Memories is much better than Nextcloud’s own Photos, it lacks many essential features like easy filtering of your collection. You basically have to sort your photos yourself.
Unless Hetzner offer something on top of Nextcloud file sync is done via Webdav, not sftp or rsync. But basically every OS has Webdav clients.
Calendar and Contacts are also synced via DAV. CalDAV and CardDAV. Works well for me on Android with DAVx⁵.
If I go with the VPS option I’d like to host Immich instead. But it seems to be hungry for memory, especially with the ML features enabled.
A bonus question regarding the 3-2-1 backup strategy. If my VPS is in Germany, but I spin up a Storage Box in Finland, that falls within the boundaries of “off-site backup”, even if both are managed by Hetzner. What do you think? It’s just easiest to setup, I guess. Otherwise I need another cloud provider (perhaps some S3 object storage).
I have a similar setup:
I am running a small/cheap Hetzner VPS with a few static and PHP websites, Forgejo, Vaultwarden, Mosquitto/InfluxDB/NodeRed/Grafana, KopiaUI, a gameserver in NodeJS, etc. All in containers, managed with Portainer and Nginx Proxy Manager. All is very little used, my server is falling asleep 😉. I backup the VPS and several home computers with Kopia to a 5TB StorageBox in the same datacenter via SFTP.
Currently I am looking at using the same storagebox for a large collection of Photos, but I’ve not determined yet what software to use. I wanted to use Vernissage but I found out too late that it strongly prefers S3ObjectStorage. So that is now on hold, considering running a NextCloud instance in Docker. I can mount the Storagebox to the VPS using SMB, but I have not tested the performance yet.
Running the first backups of the home computers with external hard disks took ages over the Internet. Kopia compressed our data to about 3TB, but it still took about 2 weeks to upload to Germany (we did pause the backups when we were using the computers). Now that it is done, a backup usually takes a few minutes to half an hour depending on the number of changes.
If you are serious about off site backup, you should also consider using a different provider for your backup. This will make sure your data is safe when your primary provider has financial problems or when your payment gets lost.
@steel_for_humans Go for a different provider. If for some reason you lose access to your Hetzner account then you still have access to your backups. I have my VPSs with Hetzner, but S3 and DNS elsewhere.
You can export and import calendars and contacts as .ics and .vcf files from/to Nextcloud.
The mobile apps even have a setting to do this automatically on a schedule, they’re saved to your files in Nextcloud. It’s a bit strange it’s not a server-side feature, but it’s there anyway.
Many Nextcloud apps only store their data to the database, if you end up using those, you’ll be reliant on Hetzner’s backups with Storage Share, and you can’t get those for yourself. I don’t think you can get a db dump from Hetzner even via customer support.
A VPS will start to get expensive if you have more data, but you can just lift-and-shift that to a home server later.
I really don’t understand this “Nextcloud does too much” rhetoric, the standard bare metal installation is basically just Files, Photos, Calendar and Contacts. Also a built-in text/markdown editor. Everything else is an add-on, which needs to be installed separately.
I really don’t understand this “Nextcloud does too much” rhetoric, the standard bare metal installation is basically just Files, Photos, Calendar and Contacts
That’s just my impression based on their website, it looks like a business suite, but I’m probably looking at it wrong. Thank you, the part about the database is important.
Thank you, the part about the database is important.
Of course that depends on the apps in question and if you are even able to install additional apps in a managed environment.
But not all apps are so limited. The cookbook app for instance saves all recipes as markdown files you can easily share with others, download or backup.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters SFTP Secure File Transfer Protocol for encrypted file transfer, over SSH SMB Server Message Block protocol for file and printer sharing; Windows-native SSH Secure Shell for remote terminal access VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 14 acronyms.
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