I migrated to Nextcloud, not OpenCloud

Just last week I wrote that I am ready to switch from OneDrive to OpenCloud. But things have changed a bit since then. Hetzner announced a price increase, and I just ordered a new service from them: Storage Share powered by Nextcloud. So instead of switching to OpenCloud, I switched to Nextcloud.

Honestly, I don’t want to care about self-hosting my files. I just want easy-to-use, European, and trustworthy online storage for my personal files. With an app to automatically back up the photos from my phones and maybe a nice gallery application.

Many years ago, before I switched to OneDrive, I already used Storage Share. Since then the service has improved; I feel the speed is much better now, and the storage got cheaper, and all packages allow custom subdomains now.

So instead of self-hosting OpenCloud and PhotoPrism with an S3 storage backend, I just let Hetzner care about all the hosting stuff and just provide me with the final product. A reason why I would not self-host Nextcloud is all the PHP stuff. I already self-hosted Nextcloud, and I don’t have the best memories about the administration side of things. But as a user, Nextcloud is quite pleasant, at least the basic file and picture functionality. For contacts and calendars, I have a separate Baïkal instance. All the features I wanted from PhotoPrism are already included in the Nextcloud Photos app. I can view photos in a timeline, I can see them grouped by place, or I can view them on a map. The mobile app is polished, and the photo backup works perfectly. There’s also the Nextcloud Notes app (which I already blogged about in 2020) that allowed me to finally delete my Simplenote account.

On my recently updated home server, I have a cron job that mirrors the Nextcloud content every few hours with rclone and also creates a versioned backup with restic. On the VPS I also have a backup setup with rclone and restic to back up all files versioned to an object storage bucket at Scaleway. So I have every file in at least three places.

Given Hetzner’s price increase, I can consider downscaling the VPS again whenever Hetzner’s Falkenstein region isn’t disabled anymore; currently, no rescales or new orders are possible.

But even considering a potential price increase for the Storage Share (that wasn’t announced yet with the recent “price adjustments”), I consider it great value for the money. 1 TB for round about 5 euros is a steal. The backup storage at Scaleway (even though I opted for one zone) would be pricier at 1 TB usage.

Motivated by all the migrations (OneDrive to Nextcloud, Gitea to Forgejo, Proxmox to NixOS, and DeSEC to Bunny DNS), I also considered switching from my self-hosted mail server to Soverin. But I canceled that migration, as there’s simply no mail service that ticks all the boxes for me (all green checks on MECSA, 100% on internet.nl, DANE, MTA-STS, GDPR with DPA, full Sieve support, and a few other things). My current setup has worked reliably for over a year already, and when I need to send mails to the few providers that just accept whitelisted IPs, I send them through an AWS SES relay. Using an American service provider doesn’t matter when the recipient is using iCloud Mail anyway.