Our typical librem one customer: Mr. Bean wants to escape from Google and replace these apps. He needs to store his mail in a cloud in order to sync a Linux desktop pc and his old Android device and keep his files safe and sound. His wife wants to read his calender (he’ll knows why) and fill it up with rendez-vous. Mr Bean needs his contacts to be synced as well. Then Mr. Beans uses a keepass manager on all devices (sync!). Some cloud space for file transfer completes his daily use.
Formerly: Google apps + dropbox
Now: pays 70$ for librem one. His wife is still with gmail, because they think 70 bucks is enough so far.
Ah, one more thing: they are not tinkerers and cannot create an own-cloud server. Their provider only allows dynamic ipv6 adresses and a dyndsn is not an option for several reasons.
Has anyone an idea how to help him to use his mr.bean@librem.one account now and how to get their daily use case working?
Would you like to share your ideas/ solutions about possible solutions? Regards, Jan
I’ll take a stab, BUT let me just say my solution does not include only FOSS software. (Gasp!)
Firstly, are you sure that your $70 annual bill does not include more accounts? I’m pretty sure I paid similar and it was for a family pack that included 5 accounts. That might be a good way to save money and include as many people as you need under the Librem One paradigm.
Secondly, as for your syncing solution: Resilio Sync. It uses bit torrent technology to keep files between computers in sync. It does block level syncing so it is bandwidth efficient. And for every device that you have insync you will increase the rate at which those devices not in sync get synced. (Up to network saturation) Best part is you do not require any additional hardware. You put it on your home computer, laptop, phone, NAS, etc… As long as the device which has the most current data is on, it can be synced with any other devices running Sync.
There might be a FOSS alternative to Resilio Sync but I’ve not found one that doesn’t need you to setup your own cloud first.
You don’t have to be a tinkerer, you can hire one. Also what’s this fascination with “cloud”? Just create your own 24/7 server, (yes same tinkerer could do that).
Sorry, it will be expensive. You’d have to own an IP address and register a domain. Getting an ISP that will let you host a server from home would also be expensive. They would probably want you to have a business account.
They (the ISP) normally don’t have any clue as your traffic looks like normal traffic these days. As long as your server isn’t seeding tons of torrents the ISP wont care. I’ve been running several servers from home and have never asked for anything other than broadband.
Charter/Spectrum, which isn’t exactly a good internet service provider, works fine for me for hosting everything other than email (since they put my IP on a blacklist for other email providers , then ask me to use their email service as if that is an acceptable alternative).
This is confusing. Who’s Mr. Bean a typical customer of? This typical person sure has a lot of specific rules to make their goals not possible.
Why was their a reference to OwnCloud? It’s Nextcloud now and they simplified its setup and management. Also you don’t need to create your own Nextcloud to use one.
Why isn’t https://www.noip.com/ an option for them. I’ve been behing a dynamic IP for many years now without a domain name service that updates dynamically and it’s no big deal. (I use Google Domains, but it’s because it’s cheap and they offer the best secure services for what I do)
How is a non-tinkerer finding their way to Librem Products? How did a non-tinkerer find a cloud in the first place? I didn’t notice this till after I wrote the reply, but their’s tinker free hardware:
Also, also, Mr. Bean should tell Mrs. Bean that free is the most expensive price to pay for something, just ask any drug-addict that started with a free sample.
One thing that gets overlooked with having your own server is Natural Disaster/theft. To deal with this you need a second equivalent server, to sync them, and a second geographical location with power and internet.
I’m not saying it can’t be done, just saying a server in your home is not a direct replacement for “cloud”.
Ummm, I would say you just need a reliable set of backups. I don’t know too many people that are running a server that must have 24/7 365 day uptime, and if they aren’t, then having a good backup is all you need to get back up and running on a single piece of hardware.
Maybe that’s true if you are serving the public. If a person is just doing their own home, the backups can just be stored on a different PC. I got a really cheap server by searching no operating system and refurbished. I have a 2U rack sitting on a wooden shelf with an appropriate battery backup. For about $500 USD I got a great machine with built in RAID and SSD drives. No synching, no multiple locations, no static IP, no business class speed. It’s really great. And apps out the ass: https://apps.nextcloud.com
If the backups are in the same house and the house burns down, is burglarized, destroyed hurricane/tornado/tsunami (if you live in one of those areas) etc, off-site backups become very important for the average persons pictures of their family.
When comparing to cloud solutions that would allow you to have your pictures back after any of these scenarios, it’s only fair to compare with a similar solution.
Okay, so put the backups on a portable drive or a laptop and keep them in your trusted other persons home. I have options in my Virtualmin server manager to offsite the backups (Amazon, Rackspace), but I don’t want to use that. The backups are a single file for an entire domain/subdomain, so you could encrypt the file before moving it offsite.
Also, I don’t buy into your burglary scenario. First, nobody, not even cloud provider companies are impervious to theft. Most people aren’t burglarized. Of the people who are, a server isn’t the goto looting item to carry away; it’s a mass to resale value based knapsack problem. If a thief goes for your server, you’re not just keeping family photos on it.
Also, you are creating a false equivalence between Surveillance Economy cloud providers, and private cloud’s. It’s not fair to compare as if the selling of your data isn’t a factor.
While the cloud provider could be burglarized as well, the point was that even if they were it’s extremely unlikely all their sites that house your data would be hit at once so you would still have your data. You bring up a very solid point that this is the least likely scenario, of the examples I gave, to actually result in losing your data.
I agree that it’s not fair to not include surveillance economy as a factor, however most of the people I know would rather have that risk than the risk of lost personal data. I don’t agree with them and run my own server backed up my own way. My point was to make sure the off-site portion is also addressed as the recommendation here looked to be the same “just host your own server it’s cheap and easy” that I see recommended fairly often as a replacement to the cloud solutions that are hosted on redundant hardware in multiple location.
I very much appreciate your points as they balances back out my points.
Quick aside; is it fair to point out some cloud providers don’t appear to be surveillance economy based, at least for just cloud storage, and claim to not even gather metadata?
Sure you can’t truly know for certain, but they are making the claim and are charging for their services, it seems to me that you would have solid recourse if they ever did turn out to be selling your data.
To me these types of solutions might be a valid middle ground for the majority of people.
wants to escape from Google and replace these apps. He needs to 
store his mail in a cloud in order to 
sync a Linux desktop pc and his old Android device and keep his files safe and sound. His wife wants to read his 
calender (he’ll knows why) and fill it up with rendez-vous. Mr Bean needs his 
contacts to be synced as well. Then Mr. Beans uses a 
keepass manager on all devices (sync!). Some 
cloud space for file transfer completes his daily use.
, then ask me to use their email service as if that is an acceptable alternative).