📑 Lessons in Self-Hosting Your Own Personal Cloud

Ernie Smith discusses the challenges associated with hosting your own cloud. He provides a summary of his findings.

So, armed with the knowledge that Syncthing is awesome but didn’t cover every one of my bases, I went with a hybrid approach. Rather than attempting to embrace one solution for everything, I decided a mix of solutions was the way to go, each optimized for specific needs.

1. NextCloud for standard document editing and office-style applications, which can be useful in cases when I’m not near my machine or I want to make a quick edit to a file on mobile. This sync runs on just one machine, my Xeon—the same Xeon that hosts the server on Docker—and only stores essentials like text files and images at this juncture. (Essentially, I took away NextCloud’s need to sync most of my files.)
2. Syncthing for file sync across a variety of machines. This runs on every machine I rely on, including iOS and Android.
3. Backblaze B2 for long-term cloud file storage, which I manually handle once a week through the command-line tool Rclone. (Info here; I could easily automate this.)

This is an interesting piece in regards to discussions of quitting platforms such as Google and Spotify.