Story

The beginning

First question is: where do I store my data.

There are many possibilties. I can choose between various hosting companies or I can host them on my own. Selfhosting is what I chose. I started with a raspberry pi and an external hard drive. The lack of performance and the ARM platform was in my eyes a hassle. So I bought a NAS from Synology. I didn’t pay enough attention on choosing the model, so I couldn’t run VM’s and didn’t have that much freedom. Finally I built a NAS on my own and the result makes me happy.

The cloud

Now I have a place, where I can store my data. Access to the NAS via PC works good. But I have a smartphone, which generates data too. Mainly photos. I started to think about what happens when I lose my phone. All pictures, contacts and calender items would get lost. Best way to prevent this is to synchronize this data with a server, where it will be saved independently. After some research I found Nextcloud, a cloud software made for people to host it on their own. All you need is a webserver, a database and space for your data. The best place to host my Nextcloud instance is a VM on my NAS. The procedure to set up a VM was pretty straight forward. Once the VM was set up and Ubuntu installed, I could start installing Nextcloud.

The smartphone

For my smartphone there are two goals.

  • First goal is to avoid using Google’s cloud like Drive and Photos
  • Second goal is to completely get rid of Google Play Services

The first goal, you can achieve with any smartphone. Here you get some details, what it needs resp. how I set my Android up.

For the second goal you need to reinstall your smartphone with a custom rom. Either you are lucky and your phone is already supported by a rom or you need to buy one which is.

There are many different Android flavours I know about three popular ones

  • GrapheneOS
  • LineageOS
  • /e/OS

I tried LineageOS for a few years. Now I switched to GrapheneOS, because it satisfies my desire for security more. Every android comes with default apps. Some of them I like, others less. It took me some time to look for alternatives to set up my phone the way I want. But in the end I am quite happy.

The backup

Last but not least: the backup. What if something crashes? What if I accidentally delete a file? What if I get hacked? Okay, the last one is not really likely to happen, but still it is something I can address with backing up my data.

In my life I tried collected experiences with different backup solutions. Today I usually recommend two solutions.

  • Veeam Agent
  • Urbackup

Yes, I know, Veeam Agent is not open source, and there is a company behind it. But it is free for single computers and it works very well.

Urbackup is my backup solutions since many years. It is server based and does it’s job. Luckily I never needed to restore files.

You can also have a look at the following projects. I have no experiences with them, but they seem to be good projects too.

  • restic
  • Kopia
  • Plakar

The end

I hope I could give you an idea of what I have done and why I have it done. Maybe you want to do the same or only parts of it. Maybe you got some new or other ideas. I thank you for taking the time to read about my story and projects. It makes me happy if my experiences help you in any way.