A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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This will be an unpopular suggestion here but why not just go all in on iCloud? It's reasonably inexpensive for not data-hoarding amounts of data, reasonably secure and E2E encrypted. Given the low cost, zero setup if they're already Apple people and lack of admin I think it is ideal for them.
I pay for iCloud storage because I want HomeKit Secure Video cloud storage (I also have a local copy on disk).
One reason I would give is that apple and google makes it incredibly hard to leave. I had to use some third party script (and give it my credentials or token..) Just to export pictures with the exif metadata from iOS. Even Google's obnoxious "select a few thousand pics at a time" was easier (Google takeout puts the metadata separately, so it was also not an option).
Another reason is that big tech companies are complacent with kidnappings and oppressors and don't want to give them money.
I could see apple breaking the tool or throwing their legal team around in the future if it keeps some people on their platform, why not leave while you can more easily.
Fair enough, I knew my take wouldn't be a popular one here. In all fairness if you are using Apple products the iCloud sync brings all of the metadata with the data on every device that accesses it.
While I don't have any illusions that Apple has my back they do have a lot invested in keeping people's trust in their ecosystem. The automated on-device CSAM scanning kerfuffle that they backed away from shows that they are sensitive to the threat of people leaving their walled garden.
Another fairly easy to implement local solution that wouldn't be an admin headache is to put a Mac mini with a bunch of attached storage on the network and use it as a file server. I do that for my PleX.
I only had an older iPhone (which I liked for the most part), but it was announced to not be getting security and related updates soon (what apple calls vintage at this point) so there wasn't much of an ecosystem once I got a different phone and exporting my pictures to my NAS, new phone, desktop and laptop made more sense.
I supposed I could lose everything if all of those burn in a house fire, but since I always have my phone on me, I'd imagine there would be more pressing matters like not burning to death myself.
Edit: I also have some stuff at my relatives, but their internet sucks, so I only sync family and more important pics there.
I was 110% a Google fan until about 9 years ago, when Project Fi was headed towards public release, and devices purchased from them (effectively through the Google Store with a different sticker on the box) kept mysteriously going missing in transit, and the customer got an empty box/a brick/whatever. This is annoying on its own, but G/Fi cs response to these instances were awful. As I was a Fi user (woo closed beta gang), and I bought my devices thru Fi, I became concerned that this might happen to me. That thought quickly snowballed, and I started migrating out of the G ecosystem because the realization that their cs is useless and if I ever have a dispute or situation, they can just delete my account without giving a single fuck.
To pay a company money and not receive some assurances that my data won't be wiped out of the blue while I am asleep, is - in my opinion - fucking stupid as hell. I don't know how the apple situation is, but until proven otherwise, fuck both of them for anything you care about.
Forgot about that yes, heard of horror stories of people being locked out of gmail, google support being useless and losing so much time and money migrating accounts manually by having to visit banks and the like.
can you verify that it's E2E encrypted?
yeeah I personally wouldn't trust something that is"probably" e2ee, especially when there are options that are provably e2ee
to each their own ig
Simple poc test. Turn off your iphone, get a new iphone. Sign into icloud, can you access your images without manually typing in a key?
If not... The it's probably e2e
Do a deep trace and you’ll see that all of Apples off shore data centres are Alphabet owned. There’s encryption but Apple is just renting from the least privacy focused company. Also Apples privacy is really not much more than marketing. All you need is a CEO change or hey how about the current one embracing nazism casually from his own wallet?
Low cost is the only argument here, but once you go NAS + VPN you never go back.
Synology. Although I'm sure other ready made NAS machines will probably work and be chapter if you want to explore.
QNAP gives more bang for the money.
cheers I'll check them out
Euh depending what you get. Don't be fooled by their "ZFS" offering. It is a very very outdated and forked form of ZFS. I converted to TrueNAS scale with my qnap recently. Worked great. Although some things you have to do a rather advanced for more casual users.
I had the lower end one when I switched from Synology, 2-Bay. Everything was the same, a few UI differences, same functionality. Don't know what it looks like today since I moved to ProxMox, and just backup everything to it and then 3-2-1 it, but it can't have gotten harder to use, can it?
I've heard that name a lot so they must be serious, thanks
@PotatoesFall i'm a bit shocked to read so many Synology recommendations. Are you all living under a rock or did you already forget the stunt they tried to pull off with their branded HDD vendor lock-in?
QNAP, UniFi or Ugreen would be my picks.
thanks, appreciate the info
@PotatoesFall Whatever you do .. do the same thing at your house and use one to offsite backup the other.
Synology, with QNAP as a close #2. There are other decent options, but they aren't quite as polished so they may require more "actual computer knowledge" to troubleshoot from time to time.
Whichever one you go with, don't expose it to the internet directly or use their offerings. They are a big target and just don't get enough security.
I use TrueNAS, which supports TimeMachine out of the box and I have set up Samba-shares to make it simple for family members to drop files in a shared folder. Some of them also have a personal folder. This works on Linux, Windows and MacOS. I also use Wireguard to make sure they always have access to the share.
TrueNAS has a learning curve, but it is reasonably well documented and if you spend some time up front, it pays of.
I use an HP EliteDesk 800 Mini with two boot disks for redundancy and several disks connected trough USB3. Using USB disks are discouraged by TrueNAS but it has worked fine for several years for my low budget setup.
What do you all think of the Buffalo brand? I've been thinking about one of those for a while now.
I'll look into those, thanks
I have an old surplus QNAP. I love it. Very capable, easy to setup, easy to use it and forget about it. Mine is set up for RAID5.
Be certain to get a reliable UPS for it. And have a spare drive on hand.
This. Everyone starts off thinking they'll buy a NAS and it will just exist for years to come. There is some maintenance and monitoring involved, and if you "set it and forget it", you can say goodbye to all that data.
Please consider RAID6 or ensure your data is fully backed up. RAID5 falls flat if a drive fails during resilvering the array.
And, because a resilver involves significant load on the remaining drives, it's more likely than you think. If you have drives from the same batch, they likely have the same MTTF.
@RunningInRVA
Please don't label RAID a backup because it is not. RAID 1, 5 or 6 will give you a robust drive pool that is able to recover from a failed drive.
Backups should be done on a different medium and ideally off-site.
Well I wasn’t trying to, exactly. Just trying to convey that RAID5 is not considered reliable and that I was urging the commenter to ensure they have a backup if that’s what they are going to use. Regardless of how you configure your NAS, you can always lose data by mistake.
It's not an extra life, it's another health point. Red mushroom, not green mushroom.
@captain_aggravated It is a little cryptic.
Mario analogy. In Super Mario games, a green mushroom gives you an extra life, a chance to start over from a point in the past. A red mushroom makes Mario bigger, allowing him to survive some damage that would have killed him. Also in many games it makes him able to do things he can't when small. RAID arrays often run faster than individual disks would.
thanks, I'll look into it
I haven’t used them but umbrel looks promising: https://umbrel.com/
I’m using a synology and as others have said, it’s pretty friendly to non-techies, with lots of point and click configurations
@piyuv @PotatoesFall I mean its running a proprietary os software and its terms of service say "the company is under no obligation to provide support or maintenance services." .. so I woukd say rather than being dependent on a random company that may disapear in a puff of smoke. Why not just use opensource software on commodity hardware and use something like #yunohost?
@piyuv @PotatoesFall Actually their licence is Polyform noncommercial github.com/getumbrel/umbrel/bl… and their app packaging is docker based github.com/getumbrel/umbrel-ap… @888coop - have you seen this?
@PotatoesFall Good to hear your parents are aware of the issues with 'cloud' services and choose to invest in a NAS. To be honest any off the shelf NAS will do. Important is to determine the storage capacity they will be needing for the next five years and add a good 50% to that number. For instance, you expect they need 2.5 TB then you should get 4 TB netto storage.
Depending on your backup strategy and how robust you want the NAS storage to be you can choose a single bay or a multi bay NAS.
Yeah dad was already saying something like "let's just get like 10 tetabytes (sic) so it will be enough for a long time" lol
Thanks I really appreciate it, I might get back to you about the backups.
@PotatoesFall A good off-site data backup is definitely something to look into. Where will you place the NAS and where will the backup be stored? Let me know if you need any guidance on this topic.