Cloud

Continuing with my journey to replace publicly hosted cloud services with self-hosted solutions. One of the nice developments of the recent years are services like Dropbox or Google Drive, which really simplify some use cases. For example, in my own workflow I mainly use these services to a) synchronize unix configuration files, b) synchronize some random temp files I need on several computers or which I need from my phone (I am usually too lazy to get a cable), c) for easy sharing of photos or other files, and d) for synchronizing my Lightroom catalogue across devices, a quite heavy task because of the monolithic sqlite file with > 1 GB. There have only been a few cases where I actually used a shared folder for collaborative work. Computer scientists have better tools for such jobs. ;) So my need for something that is really accepted by many users is again questionable. Hence, I could easily search for a self-hosted solution without many drawbacks. ...

In the light of the recent NSA issues I have been reconsidering whether I really need to use public cloud services or not. The main benefit that I see in publicly provided services (despite the technical setup) is large amount of users that potentially enhance the service. There needs to be a tradeoff between these benefits and the data that one gives away to the service providers etc. One kind of service I have been using for some time now is a news feed reader / aggregator. First Google Reader and after the shutdown Feedly. I never used any collaborative feature for a news feed reader, so there is really no benefit in using a public service despite the setup overhead. So I started to search for a privately hosted alternative. Basically I had only a few requirements: ...