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?
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.