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Comment by sjw987 | Hacker News Reader

I can't tell whether I'm being super paranoid but I've been burned by Google so many times on product sunsets that I've just removed all of my data from them.

I managed to set up private self-hosted versions of an email client, photo viewing app, and barebones alternative to Docs and Sheets. Switched from Google to Kagi, and Chrome to Brave, but generally keep my own bookmarks of sites to use rather than using search engines.

I still run a skeleton Pixel, but the storage is almost exclusively just a very limited range of apps I use. I managed to get Google One storage from about 700GB to about 700Mb over the course of the last month or so.

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Sounds like you're not using something like Nextcloud (which should cover all your bases it seems). Any particular reason, any experiences you want to share?

I just sort of wanted to learn how to build (rudimentary) versions of the same apps I've always used made by other companies/people, and like the idea of the data being as clean as possible. I'm a bit of a data purist, so I store all of my photos unedited, and keep all of my text documents as simple as possible (minimal formatting, data-heavy).

I'm also wary of just moving from one product to another, with the hassle of transferring things over constantly, security breaches, product sunsetting and all of those sorts of things.

I'll give Nextcloud a look out of curiosity.

I'm on a similar page. I try to set things up so that as many things as possible are regular files in my folder structure, which I then sync across devices. In my experience those are the only files I can rely on being able to retrieve long-term. Eg I don't use a photo app at all, I just have a folder with sub-folders (where I copy them manually). I don't know (yet) how Nextcloud fits with that, but it has several features that look really interesting in general (eg video calls).

I'm working on De-Googling. I now have a Mac and an iPhone instead of Windows/Android, but switching from Drive to iCloud seems a fairly parallel move.

I also set up my first home server with RAID NAS. It's on my list to spin up an OpenOffice container or something I can use to replace Google Sheets. That will let me delete my Drive data; next is Google Photos and eventually Gmail.

It took about a week for me to completely de-Google from scratch.

Drive was easy enough to download everything off, but the real pain in the arse was Google Photos. I had something like 250 individual 2GB zip files and the supplementary metadata was separated off of the image files themselves. I had to put together some Python scripts to clean up all the different file naming formats over the years (PIXL_YYYYMMDD, IMG_YYYYMMDD) into just YYYYMMDDD, and reattach the metadata, and then check through that everything was safely downloaded before deleting the Google Photos.

Google Photos had some weird caching issues where it kept showing images I'd deleted and emptied from the bin, which was a little concerning. They were only appearing on my phone and persisted multiple times after clearing the cache. I couldn't find them anywhere in the phones internal storage.

Perhaps google takeout would have been easier?

That was Google Takeout! Although in retrospect I did find larger ZIP size options after doing the original export. But it filled Google Drive with 700GB of folders, so I just stuck with downloading the 2GB ones.

Why does yours go to drive? When I do a takeout, it just has links to download, not on drive.

Is your home server LAN only or have you configured it in some way to be accessible and secure on the internet? I'm interested in setting up a fileserver myself but I'm not sure what the latest is on security.

Tailscale is a great place to start. It uses a VPN to access your servers while outside of your LAN while avoiding the security risk of them being wide open to the internet.

So the way I understand Tailscale is that it's built on top of Wireguard; Tailscale claims it's "easier to use" but I haven't found Wireguard to be difficult to configure at all. Are there any extra benefits to using Tailscale that I'm overlooking?

Yes, Tailscale uses Wireguard. If you can use Wireguard, that is great. That is not an option for many people who are behind a CGNAT and/or do not have the ability to setup port forwarding. Tailscale also makes it easier for sharing access with other users.

I definitely don't open a bunch of ports to the internet! I use Wireguard to VPN back into my home network from my mobile devices. Wireguard only responds to packets that contain a valid preconfigured crypto key, so while the WG port is technically "open" it doesn't respond to a port scanner.

What’s your Docs and Sheets alternative?

I’ve looked, I’ve never found anything that seems to both cover all the bases and not feel like a bad Microsoft clone.

I just developed a webapp for it. I only used Docs for personal reasons, so my own version is basically just a really stripped down rich text editor. A lot of things I just save to .txt files.

It saves (both locally and to self-hosting) to JSON and, exports to PDF and HTML. And then I wrote a script to convert docx files over when I migrated from Google.

Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel?

.xlsx is the key. Can use it with sheets, M$ or libre office. Or unzip it and take a look at XML.

same problem?

I just use any scripting language, mostly Typst, because then I have the analysis directly in the document

Through my kDrive subscription, I get access to their own instance of OnlyOffice

It looks a bit dated like MS Office, but it does the job and since it used MS Office formats, I can edit the documents with Libre Office or other sofwares. And using the API, I can programatically access those files.

https://www.infomaniak.com/en/ksuite/kdrive

https://www.onlyoffice.com/

Obsidian with Syncthing works great for me over Docs.

Haven't found a good self-hosted Sheets alternative yet.

Sheets is the one thing I haven't found a good self-hosted alternative to.

I tried Nextcloud a couple of years ago but found it really buggy and slow. Even the basic notes editor on Android was absolutely terrible. Absolutely no comparison to what I'm using now, Obsidian with Syncthing.

Can anyone recommend a good sheets alternative other than Nextcloud?

Why Brave over Firefox?

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