Remote file storage service options

Technology
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Hi folks,

I’m looking a Dropbox/OneDrive/Google Drive alternative to use for personal-file-storage/cloud-backup/synchronization-across-multiple-machines.
Is there a co-op in the UK (ideally) which hosts NextCloud (or other alternative?) on a server and rents out accounts/storage?

Something like thegood.cloud ( Consumer subscriptions, flexible & shareable | The Good Cloud ) or data.coop ( Services | data.coop ) but a co-op based in the UK?

If not - would there be any appetite for setting one up? / adding it as a service to an existing co-op? data.coop says “open to inquiries from abroad to start sister infrastructures based on the same principles”, if that would be useful.

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I know there are a few places (e.g. Web Architects, Autonomic, likely many others) who will happily host Nextcloud instances for people, but I’m looking for just an account rather than a whole instance (i.e. I’m looking to pay ~£5-20/month)

I’m realising I’m probably thinking about this from a non-techy perspective, while slowly becoming more techy. Do the “real” techy folks just rent a server space and use rsync or something like that for this? Is there a way to neatly automate this so that files stay up to date on multiple systems and can be accessed on the fly via a webpage on a phone for example?

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you could try https://www.commonscloud.coop

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If it is just a need for syncing files between devices that I’d suggest considering using Syncthing:

The official Android app is no longer being developed but for more technical people you can run the CLI version in a terminal.

Webarchitects can provide Netxloud / ONLYOFFICE on shared hosting but it works better when we provide it as a managed service on it’s own virtual server (which can be shared with other applications, but one client has, in effect or literally, root on the machine) as you can then better configure it and have other services running on it for various Nextcloud apps (for example full text search or anti-virus scanning of files etc etc) .

A Nextcloud user account, without admin access, on an instance shared with a lot of other unrelated and unknown people doesn’t sound like a great option to me for sharing private files from a security / privacy point of view, but I have never tried a service like this and I don’t know how it is specifically locked down to ensure privacy and security.

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Autonomic’s https://cooperative.computer/ is just an account, rather than an instance (isn’t it?) and includes Nextcloud

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Thanks, i wasn’t aware of that one. They kept that well hidden!

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I’ve been using this fork of the Syncthing android app for years and found it much better than the main one. Looks like it’s continuing to be maintained too.

Huh, I guess I can’t post links yet, but it’s Catfriend1/syncthing-android on github.

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Just on that, the Synthing Fork works perfectly for me. In fact, much better than the old pre-fork app!

I installed it via F-Droid: Syncthing-Fork | F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository

Synthing is really solid for personal use. Doesn’t work so well with more than a couple of people or for public or link based collaboration due to the security model and P2P technical design.

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Yes sorry about that, we really need to update our website with more of our projects. It’s just an experimental (well the software is stable) platform co-op. It doesn’t have many members yet and the sign up is still very manual.

Feel free to contact us if you want an account anyone! It’s very cheap. Matrix is where the majority of commons software projects hang out. There is a CoTech channel for example: #cooptech:autonomic.zone

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@da5nsy Nextcloud is the flagship open source project for this use case. You can access your files via the Dropbox style sync client, web client or mobile apps. It even has a big ecosystem of apps e.g. calendar, contact, tasks, cobudgeting. It also allows for collaborative document editing although this isn’t as good as Google Docs for multiple users.

Also, just bear in mind that backups are not the same as file sync/storage. Backups should be a separate system that is designed for that use case. In Autonomic we use a mix of Restic and Borg. There are apps and services such as Vorta and Borgbase that make that world a bit easier.

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For backup of my desktop I use borgmatic, which is a configuration layer on top of borg that makes it easier to back up to multiple locations: I have one repository on my homeserver and another on some S3-compatible service (Hetzner I think? I should probably stop giving them money…).

Just to throw another one into the mix, I was recently made aware of whatbox.ca — not a co-op but specialises in very large storage.

Still can’t post links but maybe this works: https://torsion.org/borgmatic/

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