[tlug] A More Open App Cloud

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

On 2014-11-12 12:57 +0900 (Wed), Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> Scott Robbins writes:
>
>  > I've always felt that anti MS stuff on the part of Linux (or even
>  > Mac) users is a bit like a little dog barking at a big one.
>
> ...Bill Gates was a robber baron in the tradition of the great
> railroad, steel, and financial monopolies of the 19th century... , and
> his top people are cut from the same mold. Steve Jobs was another...

This brings to mind an interesting thought.

One of the reasons I use open source stuff (including "Linux") is not
only that it easily allows me to modify my own tools, but also run and
control my own systems to whatever degree I feel appropriate. Running my
own mail server, for example, lets me do some interesting mail routing
and also gives me a greater degree of privacy than letting someone else
do it for me.

Along with the rest of the world, I've been going considerably more
mobile these days, and my tablets are now doing a lot of things I used
to do on a laptop. I've stayed well away from the Apple world not only
because their user interfaces are rather poor, but because going with
Apple tools locks you fairly tightly in to one company. For the same
reason I tend to avoid Kindle books[1], preferring instead the Adobe DRM
world where at least you have multiple, interoperable vendors.

But while the Google/Android ecosystem is a joy to use[2] (Google Apps
gives you basically everything, everywhere, and it's surprisingly
extensible), I'm hesitant to trust it too much. While it's easy to get
your data out in usable formats via Google Takeout, there's some data I
don't want in there in the first place. So what does one do with it?

My solution for some of it has been git and ssh, which does a brilliant
job of solving the synchronization and backup problems when you have
your data on several different devices. I use this for personal
documentation, books, and photos. (With photos it can start to get
a bit awkward as the repos get large; I keep meaning to spend more
time playing with git-annex to sort out management of really large
repositories.)

But this goes only so far. For example, I still need to store a repo
on Dropbox and use (the invaluable) Dropsync app to sync repos over to
to my tablets.

Which reminds me, does anybody know of a cloud storage system similar
to Dropbox that works with Android, Linux and Windows that one can host
oneself? Oh, and provide redundancy by distributing services and storage
over several hosts, of course. The best I can think of at this point
is to set up an OwnCloud instance using SQLite with WAL, and rsync the
whole thing over to a second server on a regular basis, which I would
spin up if the first server goes down.

What do you folks do, those of you who haven't given the whole of your
life over to to a cloud provider?

[1]: Actually, I do buy a fair number of Kindle books, but almost
never anything costing more than a dollar or two; that seems to me a
reasonable price for what I consider a rental.

[2]: With the one exception that they don't provide a Google Drive sync
client for Linux. Dropbox is your friend.

[3]: http://www.owncloud.org/

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson         <cjs@example.com>         +81 90 7737 2974

To iterate is human, to recurse divine.
    - L Peter Deutsch