
What personal cloud storage would you recommend? - blkcoffee
I’ve been looking to try get away from Google cloud lately but it’s been hard to find an alternative. I’ve looked at services similar to Google cloud all the way to setting up OwnClouc on DigitslOcean but I’m still unsure. 
What do you use and recommend for personal cloud storage?
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justusthane
It's not cloud storage, but I can't recommend SyncThing enough. Syncs selected
local folders between any/all of your devices whenever they're able to contact
each other.

I use it specifically to keep my files _out_ of the cloud, but in the past
I've also installed it on a DigitalOcean instance and had it function sort of
like cloud storage that way.

My favorite thing about it is that you're selecting existing local folders to
sync rather than moving files to a special "sync" directory, meaning it's very
flexible in what you can do with it (syncing dot files between machines, as
one example).

The only problem is there's no good iOS client yet, but macOS, Windows, Linux,
Android are all supported.

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gumby
We needed to move our company off Google Docs and rather than pay Dropbox we
used OwnCloud which has worked really well for us.

The only thing we miss is shared doc editing but we only really used that
intensively a couple of times so we didn't miss it much.

The desktop integration is pretty good. The one advantage Dropbox would have
had is LAN syncing, but as we mostly work remotely this isn't a big issue.

~~~
kop316
Nextcloud is a fork of OwnCloud, and you can integrate an online office suite
with it (Callebra Online). Both can be self hosted.

~~~
gumby
Thanks, I'll give it a try!

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sanv725
I just launched File Ark two days ago on Product Hunt to solve this personal
cloud storage issue that I had. [https://www.producthunt.com/posts/file-
ark](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/file-ark)

It's not a backup solution, but rather an archive. With backups, you might
expect files to be synced after changes, which my app won't do. Rather as an
archive, you can just drag n' drop the files/folders you want to archive and
it'll be moved to cloud storage and then you can delete the local copy of
those files on your computer.

The files in this archive storage are also not meant to be shared like Dropbox
or Google Drive because it's supposed to be your personal archive of
files/folders, so there's no sharing functionality.

If that fits you what you are looking for, do give it a try.

~~~
kup0
I'm not sure recommending to delete the original/local copy is a good idea.
Better to have more copies than less, otherwise data loss is a huge risk

~~~
sanv725
I completely agree that data loss is a huge issue. Cloud storage usually comes
with pretty high redundancy, but if you're using a service you don't know much
about, it's definitely safer to keep your own copy of the file.

A use case I had was that my Mac was running out of hard disk space and I
didn't want to carry around an external hard drive or get a new Mac, just for
more disk space. I tried cleaning out as much unused applications and files as
I could, but there still remained large and old files that I wanted to
preserve to keep a record of them.

Moving it to cloud storage for archival gets me the long-term storage and by
deleting the local copies of it, I was able to get back a good chunk of space
on my Mac. Not everyone may have this use case, but it was one I came across
where deleting the local copy made sense.

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jaredcwhite
I'm using NextCloud on a DigitalOcean VPS (the files themselves are on a
separate volume so the VPS drive can remain small), and it's been really
solid. I think the web UI for NextCloud is great, and while the clients for
iOS and macOS are not best-in-class compared to, say, Dropbox, they definitely
work and get the job done. I love the fact that, at the end of the day, I have
a file on a Linux server somewhere that is THE cloud file. It's my data, under
my control, and that I'm able to troubleshoot myself. (Compare with a major
glitch I had with iCloud Drive on my Mac that Apple _never_ could get fixed
for me. I literally to this day have a broken iCloud Drive connection on my
MacBook Pro.)

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vector_spaces
I've been using Seafile recently and generally liking it. The experience with
the iOS app absolutely leaves something to be desired (photos only as far as I
can see, even though the server and web app supports other kinds of files)
though. The web apps support in app editing of markdown files. There's an
admin UI so you can easily manage accounts, and by default everything is
private unless shared.

The server was very straightforward to set up on a DO droplet. They even have
an install guide for Seafile on Ubuntu 18.04

[https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-
sync...](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-sync-and-
share-your-files-with-seafile-on-ubuntu-18-04)

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rizowski
I use Resilio Sync. I have a NAS that is running Resilio, but a computer that
you never turn off could also work. All my computers and even family members
have folders being synced to my NAS using Resilio. Then my NAS backs up those
folders and files to BackBlaze every night.

It makes it nice because I can still access all my files using the selective
sync feature and if I am moving between computers, I can drop anything in
those specific folders and have access to them on any computer running
Resilio. As well as be confident that it will be backed up and encrypted.

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ovaqre
I’m using a self hosted instance of Nextcloud, and it just works.

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yayr
Is anybody using OneDrive? The family pack for Office 365 seems to be quite
fair value.

~~~
Spooky23
I use it for work. It is way better than it was a couple of years ago, but the
sync is weaker than Google and much weaker than Dropbox, which is the gold
standard.

If you don’t upload a lot of big files often and can deal with their
restrictions for characters in file names it’s a great solution for 98% of
people.

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Spooky23
I ended up choosing Google.

Dropbox is fabulous but expensive. If you’re a Mac person and don’t need to
share folders, iCloud is much better these days as well — my spouse uses that.

Rolling your own seems like a more expensive path more likely to lead to
disaster.

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shoo
i only want to back up a few git repos, so i use aws' git hosting service,
"code commit". it costs me <= $1 / month -- i suspect it might actually be $0
/ month and the $1 charge is from some other aws service i am using.

i have other repos stored for free in private github or bitbucket accounts,
but i prefer to be a paying customer for storing some things that i feel are
more critical.

edit: it looks like aws code commit storage costs are 0.06 $ gb^{-1}
month^{-1} -- about 10x the cost of the wasabi storage mentioned elsewhere in
this discussion. but the first 50 gb month^{-1} is free.

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varunramesh
I made a site that you can use to compare features / prices between cloud
storage services - [https://comparecloud.io](https://comparecloud.io)

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SkyLinx
I self host many apps on a VPS including Nextcloud, using Wasabi for off site
backups. Very happy do far.

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ioddly
I'm using Syncthing with a VPS & backups enabled to cover the passive backup
angle. For a distributed system the whole setup was surprisingly painless.

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whitepoplar
I like Wasabi as a storage backend. It's incredibly cheap ($0.0059 GB/month)
and has no bandwidth fees.

~~~
sanv725
I'm actually using Wasabi as my cloud storage backend for File Ark
([https://fileark.launchaco.com/](https://fileark.launchaco.com/)), which is
an app I made to interface with it.

It's definitely cheaper for archiving files, but there are some catches like
minimum file size and storage duration costs, but still overall cheaper than
the other storage solutions I've come across.

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eigenspace
I use ownCloud on DigitalOcean and it works fine. It was a bit of a pain to
set up but not too bad.

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quickthrower2
Depends what it’s for? Backup? Editing files online? I use Dropbox and am
quite happy with it.

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p0d
I enjoy hetzner cloud products.

