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Forget Google Drive. Just run Nextcloud on your own VPS. I put mine on a digitalocean VPS and it costs me $5 a month for ~20GB of storage.

Nextcloud has great sync clients for linux, iPhone and Windows. (It has clients for Mac and Android too, although I've never used them.) And google doesn't get access to my data or metadata.

[1] https://nextcloud.com




For $10 you can get Dropbox (2 TB) data, so I dunno if saving that $5 is worth it in this case. You get the Linux client, and far more reliability in every aspect.

I think, if I really would want to go setting up my own thing to save money, setting/writing some service backed by object storage (AWS S3) would be cheaper and reliable enough.


>For $10 you can get Dropbox (2 TB) data, so I dunno if saving that $5 is worth it in this case. You get the Linux client, and far more reliability in every aspect.

For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.


Yes I know that. The issue around just using one VM is that it is single point of failure IMO. Yes, is unlikely that VM will die, and yes, the VM image itself is likely backed by reliable storage (they are supposed to be disposable IIRC, you'd ideally want to attach some kind of volume which is extra $$$ -- correct me if I'm wrong here).

That said, my point was with little extra money -- features such as easy sharing, security, versioning, nice mobile apps, and time saved moving around things manually (like photos), offline access (and if you use rsync cron, not worrying about conflicts) etc makes it worth that extra few $$$.


I'm a linux user but unfamiliar with how to set up and arrange those technologies in reliable (for my taste) fashion.


The comment your responding to is actually a toungue-in-cheek reference to the original Dropbox announcement on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

It's not to be taken seriously.


Does Dropbox Linux client still support filesystems other than ext4?

https://itsfoss.com/dropbox-linux-ext4-only/


The last-straw motivating reason I switched to nextcloud was because dropbox decided they wouldn't let me sync my files to an ecryptfs file system. (I believe they recanted on this policy a few months later.) I didn't like being held hostage to their bad design decisions, so I left and found a solution that worked better for me. Dropbox has also had some serious security vulnerabilities [1], which left me feeling less than confident in their ability to manage my personal data.

[1] https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/06/21/dropbox-lets-any...


Thanks for the heads up, I see this confirmed at https://help.dropbox.com/installs-integrations/desktop/syste... under the list of supported file systems on Linux (which is currently ext4, zfs and xfs on 64 bit systems, eCryptFS backed by ext4, and btrfs).


Yes; I've been using Dropbox with btrfs on Arch Linux for a month or two now. According to the Arch wiki[1], Dropbox added support back for ZFS, ecryptfs, XFS, and btrfs a little over a year ago (around seven months after they initially dropped support for everything other than ext4 on Linux). That being said, I had been using Nextcloud on a DigitalOcean droplet for a couple years before that, and I never had any issues with it. The only reason I switched back to Dropbox was that Google announced earlier this year they were getting rid of Google Play Music, and I had a bunch of music uploaded from CDs on there that I wanted to back up, and I would have ended up needing to pay more per month for the storage on a DigitalOcean instance to fit all the music than the $10/month that Dropbox charges for 2 TB.

[1]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dropbox#Using_Dropbox_w...


Nextcloud supports S3 as external storage. So it, and its app, are essentially S3 frontends.

I use nextcloud but I already have a k8s cluster where I host my stuff like calendars, notes, decks, S3.

One 10Gi volume is 1USD/month where I host mine. Yes, more expensive, but I don't need 2TB and also how come Dropbox can offer storage that cheap? What's their incentive?

Also I still use my Google account and if I add it into Fedora my Google drive appears in the Gnome file manager. So I'm confused about the lack of Gdrive client, I assume they mean from Google. But all Google has to do is expose APIs and docs and someone else will write one.


Blackblaze is at $0.005/GB/Month (so 10$ for 2TB) and they still make a profit out of it. I have no doubt Dropbox can make a profit out of users barely filling their 2TB limit then.


Or just OneDrive with office365 $7 a month for 1TB with all the other stuff


or iCloud or Google Drive which are even cheaper IIRC with more plans. But people commenting here for this post, probably care about services that support Linux.


Hope you've properly secured it, because if not, everyone will have access to your data and metadata.


I have. I set up an iptables firewall rule that allows access only from my home IP.


Don't you want to access it from your phone when mobile?


If I need access while I'm away from home, I go through my home VPN. This is what I do on my cell phone.


Why not just buy a NAS and keep it at home?

You would get way more than 20 GB.


This would be a good idea if I had decent upload bandwidth from home. When I'm on my cell phone, I'm generally syncing smaller things.


Does your home VPN not have the same bandwidth limitation?


There are OpenVPN clients for android that I use to access private LAN resources.

But I have in fact also left my nextcloud on the web. I'm not that worried.

Just have to stay informed on any big vulns, and I also stay as many releases as I can behind the bleeding edge. That helped me avoid the recent fidokey issue.


What was that issue? Link?


Exactly... you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.


Didn't someone make a comment like this about Dropbox?


Yup: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

Sidenote: Look how tiny that item ID is in the URL!


Well played!


Nice one !


Not sure if a VPS is the best infrastructure for this. S3+encryption might be a better choice.


There are no cross-platform sync clients for this, as far as I'm aware.


depending on what you mean by "cross-platform", rclone might fit the bill.


There are also quite cheap hosted instances of Nextcloud from Hetzner: https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share


Nextcloud syncing works like shit for me and the client apps don't impress. I'm planning on dumping it for Google Drive soon enough (since I don't need Linux support) since at least it's cheaper.


Exactly - Nextcloud is just WebDAV. No diffs, no smart change tracking, no duplication.

Dropbox is the best syncing solution technically, though GDrive is probably competitive.


How many 9's of durability do you think this is?


As if you desperately need 99.9999% in your private life. Let's be realistic here.

If you need it for business, pay for it and go to AWS, Backblaze, GCP, Dropbox, etc.


This is kind of a weird statement to make.. if I have photos, important documents, etc.. why would I not pay 5 extra dollars a month to host them on a service that offers more durability than I can guarantee doing it myself? It’s not like it’s so prohibitively expensive that only a business could do it.


DO has a backup option that works, is cost effective.


I put mine on Hetzner and it costs me below €24 for 3 TB (2x3TB HDDs in RAID 1). I consider €8/TB/month is a decent price to pay.


Google Drive is $9.99 for 100 GB.


Actually for 10 bucks a month you get unlimited google drive via gsuite. 10TB over here and counting. Unbeatable value proposition for hoarders

On the thread's subject, I use rclone to access it - works great.


I use rclone mount option and it works well enough but it is clunky.


Uhh, link? I pay $10 a month for gsuite and its 115gb max.


https://gsuite.google.com/intl/en/pricing.html

You need your own domain and set up GSuite Business account on it or a subdomain. Included in the offer: Google Drive - Unlimited cloud storage. The "or 1TB per user if fewer than 5 users" bit is not technically enforced. Even if it were, I think $60/month is still very competitive if you need to store dozens of terabytes.

Sticker price currently $12/month but there are also discounted offers available if you look for them


Office 365 with 1TB of OneDrive is $99/yr I think?

It’s about ~$49/yr in my country and even though I hate to deal with OneDrive compared to Dropbox, can’t beat the price as I anyway buy Office 365.


I think you mean $9.99 for 1TB


100 GB Google One plan shows up as €19.99/year for me.


That’s a pretty pathetic amount of storage for $5 a month


Well it's a VPS that I use for more than just nextcloud. And I don't use all the storage I already pay for. If I needed more, I could pay $0.10 per GB for additional storage

Google drive and dropbox are better deals for storage, so I can see why they'd be attractive for people who need more.


So that would be $100 per terabyte/mo. So I'm not sure that's an awesome deal.

A 250GB SSD is what? 30$ these days?

You could buy a lot of SSD's for that over the course of a year, and have the storage local.




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