How Jon de-Googlifyed himself and his family using Klikk and Nextcloud
«Through a bit of research and little Ubuntu knowledge Jon was fairly easily able to set up a complete cloud solution through Klikk.com»
After reading up on and researching how large companies like Microsoft, Google, and Facebook etc use our data, Jon made the decision to try and de-googlify himself and his family’s data as much as possible without it being a burden on his family (i.e. causing tension and extra work because things didn’t work).
Jon figured out the perfect solution for himself and his family over a year ago. Read about what Jon did to make it happen:
Identifying the problem
Jon identified rather quickly that the first and easiest step in this process would be to look for other options in the cloud providing area (OneDrive, Google Drive etc).
– I was very keen to keep most of the functionality provided at those big providers. I therefore created a few boxes that needed to be ticked, in order to go trough with this;
Testing existing solutions
Jon’s first idea was simple enough. Just moving his data to a Norwegian Cloud Provider (which would be GDPR compliant).
– I started testing Jottacloud. It soon became clear that Jottacloud did not meet my specs, and that solution was scrapped.
Researching and brainstorming
– After testing out Jottacloud I went back to researching and brainstorming, and started thinking about self-hosting.
There was an open-source (free) software solution called Nextcloud that seemed to fit Jon’s needs. Nextcloud even had an Office365 replacement in the pipeline at the time which made it really attractive. After reading a lot of documentation, reviews and user feedback, he decided that this was the solution he was going for.
Avoiding a physical basement server
– The next challenge was self-hosting, I was not interested in having my own physical server standing in our basement. The VPS market seemed to be very business-centric, but klikk.com was local, and had payment solutions for credit card.
– Set-up was simple and intuitive, took all but 15 minutes and the server was up and running with my preferred specifications and OS, ready for Nextcloud installation.
Experience
– I have now run Nextcloud on Klikk.com VPS for about a year, and we use it as a cloud service and as an online office suite (OnlyOffice). There has been no downtime except for my own reconfigs/upgrades etc. Reconfigs (diskspace/RAM/CPU) are done on-the-fly with no more than a reboot to apply changes (RAM/CPU).
Jon’s Nextcloud installation ↓
There are several ways to install and rund Nextcloud on a server, Jon tried a simple Ubuntu “snap” installation first, but it didn’t let him tinker the way he wanted. That led him to install it from scratch as a full installation using this guide by Carsten Rieger.
Here’s what Jon did:
Installation tips
This installation will give an A+ rating when tested from Nextcloud or from ssllabs.com. According to Jon there shouldn’t be any problems if you follow the guide, but if you use the same setup as him you need to choose the right mount point to use for storing data in /var/www/nextcloud/config/config.php. He also recommends adjusting the .mp4 buffer size to 100MB in /etc/nginx/conf.d/nextcloud.conf.
Final touches
After going through the installation process Jon installed the following apps:
- Notes – A simple notepad app
- Community Document Server / Only Office – Office365 replacement
- Calendar & tasks
- Other minor apps for different functionality
He also set up usernames for his closest family so they could upload and share family pictures and videos. A shared user was also created to share one calendar with all family activities, shopping lists, etc.
Conclusion
Through a bit of research and little Ubuntu knowledge Jon was fairly easily able to set up a complete cloud solution through Klikk.com.
– For me and my family this solution has replaced Office365 and OneDrive with very little trouble, and best of all; We have complete control over our data. Installed on a private server, hosted by a local Norwegian company with local datacenter, and fully GDPR compliant.
Jon’s top reasons for choosing Klikk
46% better performance for ⅓ of the price
Our proprietary cloud platform is built from scratch to give you the best performance. Klikk is 53% better on CPU/RAM, 36% better on DISK BW&IO and 100% better on Governance!
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