Google/Alphabet has awesome products. Besides they have provided many products through the years that provide real value to me as a consumer. Google Docs, sheets, Presentation and so on, was the go-to for me all the way through high school and university for basically any assignment, presentation or personal Excel-sheet type project. Google Drive and Google Photos have been my redundancy and backup solution for all of my important files for years – and they work like a charm. I have never had a problem with any of these solutions, and Google has never had a massive data leak that I know of. Still, I have been wanting to move away from these services for a while. Mainly for privacy concerns. However, due to the high quality of the services and the non-urgent need to move away, I was stuck. For years.
The last drop was the trade wars sparked by the current administration in the United States and the corresponding debate of “EU Sovereignty” that sparked from the tariffs and counter-tarrffs. Suddenly, where my data was stored and to whom I was paying a monthly subscription too mattered. Not only for my privacy, but also somewhat for national, or European, security.
Solution: The Old Gaming PC
Yes – I bought an old gaming PC and a brand new 4 TB Toshiba hard drive. The PC really is nothing special. Some kind of old Intel i5 4 Core CPU, 16 GB of RAM and some older GTX Nvidia Graphics card. However, it was much more powerful than my PC. After a quick install of Ubuntu server and some configuration of the disk, the server was ready.
The Setup: Docker-compose
I set up “Nextcloud Files” in a docker container and mapped the data on to the Toshiba HDD. The database itself runs postgres.
Backup: Cleura.cloud, Restic & OpenStack Swift
Any good storage system should have off site backup. I settled on using cleura.cloud, which runs on Openstack and has two data centers in Sweden. Perfect for my privacy use case. To configure the backup, I used Restic and the Openstack Swift API towards cleura to manage the backup. So now, I have weekly incremental backups of all of my files, on a datacenter in Karlskrona, Sweden.
Security: LAN Only
Google’s services are of course exposed to the internet, which is part of what makes them so attractive. I did not want my home LAN to be exposed to the internet in that way. So, the Nextcloud application is not exposed outside of my LAN. Luckily, the Nextcloud Android and Linux applications can detect changes in files, if I modify them when away from home.
Next Steps: Becoming Self-Sufficient With Tech
The NAS server was really only the first step along the way. Like many other techies, I am also a user of LLMs, for many things. These have their own privacy concerns and are very often proprietary. So my next project will be to set up an open-source focused AI that I can integrate directly into VSCode on my laptop. Without the request ever leaving my LAN.
Technical Learnings & Takeaways
Docker & Docker Compose: During this project I deepened my knowledge of Docker and Docker Compose, which is something I have used many times in the past.
OpenStack. I hadn’t even heard of OpenStack before this project. I have worked extensively with two of the large American cloud providers, namely Azure and AWS, so I was fascinated (and relieved) that there was an open source version of IaC for cloud platforms. And that these European providers, like Cleura.cloud, uses it. It was interesting to dip my toes into the Openstack project.
Ubuntu Servers. I had never worked with Ubuntu server before. Of course, it is very similar to other distributions I have worked with, like Oracle Linux and RHEL, but still there are some small differences.