Yesterday when I tried to migrate nextcloud between two locations I used one that I installed from scratch and when I got to another network I was unable to use it. In the evening when I got home I re-installed Nextcloud but this time I used the NextcloudPi package, rather than installing it myself. I tested sudo raspi-config and went to change the SSID. When I saw that I could do this I decided that it was safe for another experiment this morning.
Two days ago I went for a longer walk than usual. I walked along roads rather than along the narrow agricultural roads I normally use. I wanted to avoid crowds and dog walkers. The thing about solitude is that it’s enjoyable when you are not reminded that you are alone.
Today I will also have to try to avoid people. Some might be really happy for good weather, but not me.
Setting up a drive to be available via Samba is a relatively simple thing to do. The drawback is that you have files that are as organised as the media asset manager. It can be quite chaotic unless you have someone trained as a media asset manager, archivist, or other, to help order photos videos and more. To some degree Nextcloud is just as disorganised, initially.
I have spent more than five minutes experimenting with Nextcloud through several iterations and I have finally set things up as I want them.
Yesterday I installed Nextcloud on two devices, a raspberry Pi and an HP Elite book and I could see a clear difference between the two machines. The HP is a laptop on which I installed a minimal version of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and I installed a similar version of Ubuntu on the Raspberry Pi.
Fast on the HP Elite Book I believe I used Snap to install Nextcloud and then went to the web interface to configure it automatically by simply creating a user.
Setting up a Raspberry Pi 4 with 2gb of memory to work as a Nextcloud server is quite easy. Download the right ISO from nextcloudpi.com, flash it, put the card into your pi device and after two or three more steps you have a local machine running Pi but you still need to setup port forwarding, open a UPnP port to access the server externally and other steps.
The simpler solution is to download the Nextcloud app on your phone, as well as for the desktop/laptop that you’re using.
Nextcloud is an open source file sharing solution that has iOS, MacOS, Android, Windows and Linux apps. You can install it via a docker container, natively or via a number of other solutions. For my experiment I installed via Docker on Windows but haven’t done anything with it, and with Nextcloudpi. The latter is an ISO image that you can download and install to an SD card using the Raspberry Pi Imager.
Google, Apple and Microsoft have cloud storage solutions. So does Evernote, Kdrive and other products. The issue with all of these solutions is that they are owned by corporations. They are simple and convenient to use but at the cost of being locked in to an OS in some cases, and to corporate interests.
NextCloud is an open source alternative with hosting solutions that offer people with the choice of choosing between hosting solutions that are as local, or as remote as they want.