Hey up all. I thought this'd be a doddle to websearch myself in 5 minutes, but of course, in the monetization dystopia of the 2020s, if you search a question about products and services, all you get is astroturfed advertorials and sponsored shill crap with affiliate links. I kept my stuff in Google Photos for a while and progressively offloaded more and more of it for various reasons (mainly not trusting or liking Google). Now I'm at a point where cloud storage is undeniably a really useful thing to have on top of my offline backups, for practicality, sharing and convenience, but I don't want it being held over my head in a process of gradual enshittification by a tech giant, don't want it being fed into an AI development backdoor deal, and don't mind paying up-front for a simple single-purpose service that works. What are your thoughts on this, who would you go with? I haven't got Apple hardware so iCloud/iPhotos is out (and I've always found their cross-platform functionality lacking anyway). Microsoft OneDrive isn't really optimised for photo data and easy navigation/sharing of it, as far as I know. Of course once you search there are about a million nothing startups claiming to do it, but absent of any good track record it's hard to know you can trust any of them.
Install your own cloud software on your network with its own media front end and back up there, backing that up to onedrive, lots of software that can be used for this, owncloud, umbrel OS, many dockers of similar on unraid, loads of choice. But one drive is fine for doing it alone, just manual for categorization but you can use tags etc, our phones just back up to that and sharing albums etc is easy, also easy to embed your images from OneDrive on the forum etc. Missus backs up her ipad to Onedrive too but that is more problematic because apple but android and windows is a breeze.
Interesting. The decent Windows integration is a plus point for sure. I haven't used OneDrive for Android so idk what that's like. Do you worry about enshittification of price structures over time, with it being Microsoft? They keep gouging 365 customers for more money, it makes me nervous. They've also gone balls deep in AI investment and that's gonna burst on them at some point, economically - I fear them taking it out on their subscribers when it happens. In a perfect world I'd like to use a service provider that isn't also a really bullish venture capital player, but I don't know if that exists in tech at the moment.
With a small server, even a raspberry pi with a SATA hat or a mini pc, you can run Immich and then NextCloud/opencloud potentially for the rest. You could do a cloud file backup to something like backblaze from it. I haven’t dipped my toes in to either yet in honesty but Immich is very highly regarded in the selfhosting communities.
I'm not worried, but I do have all these things on my NAS when I decided to drop it all before, so at any point I can drop big cloud providers and use the clients for the NAS software, but that might be a bit too technical for my family as it has steps like firing up tailscale etc rather than seemless. I seem to always find 365 for £50-70 for 12-15months, not bad for 5Tb of online storage and decent office apps. If it comes to it I can set up a static IP an make it work without that layer of complication but that has a cost in it self.
Cloudflare tunnel is free and has the added benefit of handling all the certificates and renewal for you. I use it. I do currently have a static IP but that was for something else I’m not using anymore so will be dumping that off and going back to CGNAT.
I have a Western Digital "NAS" (essentially a posh external HDD) which comes with "Mycloud" backup features via a fairly user friendly app for phones. Its not a DIY solution but at least it doesn't have a monthly/yearly subscription cost.
