For the past few years I’ve been a huge fan of Dropbox. I used it to backup and sync my computers and iPhone. A bit over a year ago, I stopped using a password manager in Brave and opted to use Dropbox for that too.
Though as you know, I like my privacy. I have encryption, VPN and other securities to keep my life as private as I choose. I just never could get around the fact that anything I have on the cloud could be captured or misused by the companies I do business with. Hence I don’t use anything Google at all. They have openly admitted to reading emails to better target ads to users. I’ve hosted my own email for years. I now use Linux instead of Windows or Mac. I use an iPhone rather than an Android and I have encryption and more on each.
But all my personal files are in the cloud. And I pay for that privilege. Or am I paying to have someone else to have access to my files? In today’s fucked up world, I’m skeptical that my privacy is just an illusion.
With that in mind, I built my own Nextcloud server. Fool proof? Probably not. But I have control. I can watch if someone else is trying to peek now. Or if anything is calling home.
Nextcloud is opensource and works damn near identical to Dropbox. It even has it’s own password manager feature. Now I can keep all my passwords and personal files at home. Still perfectly sync’d across all my devices and accessible. Encrypted on all ends so no one sees my data but me. Well, more assuredly that if I had them in the cloud. I will have to move my servers to a different building once I get my own house. So if the house burns down I won’t lose everything. Plus I keep a flash drive on me with the most important files if that scenario does happen. Plus in two years, my not paying Dropbox will have paid for my new server.
I bought a high performance mini PC from Ace Magician, upgraded it’s storage to 2tb and installed Ubuntu Server. Cheap keyboard and mouse and it’s headless. Took a few weeks to get things tweaked as this is my first Linux Server. It’s looking good though.
I highly recommend this if you want the same things in life I do. What’s mine is mine. Sharing isn’t always caring. It’s getting big tech paid using your personal info. I’m not down with that. Especially if they get rich and I get nothing. Plus, the more you know about someone, the more control you can have over them. I control what I share and what others see.