The why

I’ve been frowned upon one too many times when suggesting other means of file storage besides WhatsApp (or whatever the correct capitalization is) group chats and USB drives floating around. For some reason, most of my classmates are fine with using a chat platform as cloud storage and nobody would even spend less than ten minutes creating a new Google account strictly for communal use. Personally, I’m fine with the current situation too: spam stays only on my phone and I get to manually delete the whole folder after backing up only what I need.

Yes, this is selfish.

Yes, I am indifferent to their problems and I couldn’t care less.

Everybody knows I’m an egotistic spawn of Satan that is cursed blessed by him to cure everyone’s MS Office maladies. I actually like this status quo, even though it allows people to just dismiss me with my “technobabble” (Open the installer, click “Next” 5 times and reboot)

Although I’ve definitely recommended Google Drive and Dropbox more than once as a cloud storage provider, I’ve done so to people with the technological literacy of a 6 year old, and I can prove that a 6 year old can log into an Ubuntu session, start their favorite game, open local and Youtube videos and update their computer. Fortunately, I have successfully managed to show some of the latter the ethical issues with third-party providers (even Nextcloud-based providers; in the end you are giving your data away in good faith that the company will actually follow the agreement and there is no way to prove it).

With enough spare time I decided to make a series on how to get a Nextcloud server up and running on an old computer with no fancy setups (one HDD, one partition and a swapfile, running Ubuntu Server) and explain every step. After all, this is made for absolute beginners who have only seen a CLI on TV.

What is Nextcloud?

From Wikipedia:

Nextcloud is a suite of client-server software for creating and using file hosting services. It is functionally similar to Dropbox, although Nextcloud is free and open-source, allowing anyone to install and operate it on a private server. In contrast to proprietary services like Dropbox, the open architecture allows adding additional functionality to the server in form of applications.

And before you ask,

Nextcloud is an actively maintained fork of ownCloud.

I hope that clears out a bit of confusion.
What are the benefits of it over, say, GDrive?
First of all, you own the hardware, the data and the software.
And what’s the fuss about having all those things?
As I said in the last post, the four freedoms.

Here in Albania, though, uptime (the amount of time the server is up - running and doing its job) is a problem, mainly because of the costly, yet patchy electric supply and high bandwidth prices. As for hardware prices, I’m not sure, but I know that buying a new server is more expensive per unit than buying a datacenter’s worth. Personally, peace of mind is more expensive than both. The rest is mainly technical issues that can be overcome by pressing the right buttons.

I am not making this tutorial about OwnCloud, mainly because of two reasons: Nextcloud is fully free, together with the core extensions, and OwnCloud has no Sia integration (we’ll get to this later) as for now.