I’ve been using the Google Office suite for the past 10 years and been looking for an alternative for a while. Degoogling is a hard process. I mostly use the office suite and the files storage. I teach in college and Univ, so I need to be able to access my files and presentations from different computers. I curently have 200gb storage and would maybe need an extra 200.
I have been able to try Nextcloud with the office app and, appart from a few speed issues, it was working really well. But the free accounts I manage to get is limited to 2gb and their main services seems to be buisnesses focus, and not for single users like me. I’m looking for a cheap, easy to setup cloud solution, that would allow me to use the online office suite, read audio and video files that are stored on my cloud, and maybe do web hosting to transfer my site. Can someone point me to that kind of service? Thanks
Self-hosting Nextcloud is not so difficult and it probably has the best online office integration. Personally I prefer the OnlyOffice integration. While that can be used outside of Nextcloud, it is a bit more involved in setting that up without Nextcloud.
You may have to host it yourself to get the features you need. I’ve often heard universities have lots of old PCs lying around, you may be able to get one of those and run nextcloud on it. (Or just a file server and use LibreOffice). The university probably has their own networked storage as well, can you use that?
Actually, I’m avoiding to work with the IT as much as possible. My univ has a contract with Microsoft for the 365 suite so they push us to use that. I’m pretty much the only teacher that cares about privacy and the use of FOSS, so I’m on my own for everything.
I dont completely understand the implication of self-hosting but everything seems to come back to this. Here are a few question I have.
- Could I do it on an old computer running Windows?
- Or could my modern home computer be the server?
- The computer acting as a server would need to be on, and online all the time for me to access the files?
- Would I be able to stream large files (video, audio, etc.) in real-time?
- Would I need to add an SSD if I use the old PC.
Thanks for the help!
Could I do it on an old computer running Windows? You should be able to but doing it on linux could be easier
Or rould my modern home computer be the server Possibly but would not recommend it
The computer acting as a server would need to be on, and online all the time for me to access the files? This is correct and also why cloud hosts usually have different locations hosting the same thing to provide backup in case of power down or other problems
Would I be able to stream large files (video, audio, etc.) in real-time? Yes this should be possible but your homes internet or whereever youre keeping the server and its distance from where you access it will change speeds of doing that
Would I need to add an SSD if I use the old PC Not a need, i prefer to but i think opinions on this are mixed
Thank you so much, really helpful. You people are convincing me to set-up linux on my old i5 750.
- yes*
- yes, that is completely your choice
- yes, though you could take a look at “wake on LAN”
- yes, as much as your server can handle
- I don’t think so
* it’s totally possible setting up a server on Windows (depending on which version of Windows), but I must recommend using Linux, as that would be way easier to setup and maintain, and probably will be faster overall
that seems a lot like my situation (though I’m just a student :P). awesome to see someone trying to self-host FOSS. best of luck to you!
It seems others have suitably answered your questions, but I’ll add my opinion too:
Ditch windows and use linux, you will get much more performance, reliability and of course less spyware. “Old” is probably completely fine, we are hosting loads of stuff on an old i3 with 2 cores, including streaming. If you have an old CPU it may be worth adding a basic dedicated gpu to help with video decoding when streaming video, audio should be fine however. A cheap second hand ssd would be a good purchase as a boot drive and for the container images, and then you can store the big data on a hard drive.
I’m seriously considering this. Interesting to know adding a GPU would help for video streaming, I have an unsued GTX1060. The only thing preventing me to do this, is that the setup process of rge server look quite complicated. I know it seems simple and obvious for the geek/linus community, but I spent the last evening warltching tutorials on how to do this, and none of them was using the same method and tools, and they all had some networking skills that I dont have. I’m definitely no digital idiot, but playing with network parameters is intimidating. In case something goes wrong, which will probably happen, I would probably get stuck for a while.
Do you know any good tutorials on an easy way to do this? Also, I have 2 computer I could use, which one would you recommend?
- i5 750 (oberclocked to 3.6), 12gb ram, gtx1060
- Macbook pro mid-2012, i7 2.6Ghz, 16gb ram, geforce GT 650m. Both have SSD. My plan would be to attach an external 6tb HD on USB 3.
Cheers and thanks for the help
Cryptpad.fr is a fantastic full replacement for Google Office Suite. Open sourced, encrypted, but only comes with 1GB of storage on the free plan. You can pay to add more and its reasonably priced. It provides excell, powerpoint, and word. I like using board.net at times too. It’s FOSS as well but only provides a word equivalent. A little more straight forward in my experience for others.
Cryptpad looks good, but I need way more space. 25 gb for 10 euro is too expensive for me, for such a small drive. Board is an awesome etherpad, great for short-term collaboration, I actually show it to my students. Thanks!