[Discuss] Docker and Own^h^h^h Nextcloud

[richb at pioneer.ci.net (Rich Braun)]

Mike Small <smallm at sdf.org> notes:
> I haven't yet had a problem I thought it
> would be the solution for, so haven't looked into it. The trouble I have
> is that the only people I can think of I'd share files with this way
> would only go along with it if I used Dropbox instead. ...
>
> For files I don't share but sync between machines I figured rsync (using
> rsync directly?

My main use-cases involve the household mobile phones. They aren't getting
backed up (at all, really), and we use them for picture-taking far more often
these days than back in 2013 and before (the cameras have gotten good enough
that the old SLR we used to lug around is mostly gathering dust).

Contacts and calendars become far more useful if they're shared with one
another (I'm talking within the household, not with friends who I might point
at Dropbox: I control all the software we use at home). At the moment we keep
contacts on our own phones and it's hit-or-miss whether someone knows which
email address or phone number is current or whether it's been saved at all.
Calendars? Would like to but...if isolated to one phone, they haven't been all
that useful.

At lunchtime I toyed with the 99-cent Nextcloud iOS app. Got it to sync
pictures back to my home server in, oh, nanoseconds. That means when we go on
our next trip overseas (in a couple of weeks), the pictures we take will be
streamed real-time onto our home server with unlimited terabytes of storage
(vs the iCloud service which starts to rack up costs quickly, and which I've
never trusted in the first place). No fear of loss. And they can be shared
online with friends the same way one would share a Dropbox link. Voila, the
whole vacation photo-album problem is solved without having to resort to lame
Facebook or Google Groups solutions that I've always found pretty tedious.

There are other use-cases I can imagine but these are the ones I've found in
the first 18 hours of playing with the tool.

Raw rsync won't do all that for you, unless you're an Android user and love to
tinker around within the guts of mobile apps.

-rich