Self hosted Google drive type software?

[jsnotlout1]

I love Google Drive, And will still use it for my cloud backups, However, I want a program I can run on one of my servers that would allow me to sync files to it, so I can work on stuff anywhere and have them always backed up.

I am completely comfortable in linux terminal. Any one have any suggestions?

[RONOTHAN##]

NextCloud is the go-to version for this, it has most of the same features as the G-Suite (obviously file management, though it also has Docs/Sheets/etc. equivalents, calendars, and some other add-ons). It isn't that hard to setup either, though if you weren't comfortable with the CLI I wouldn't really recommend it as the docker app has pretty bad performance issues and the stand-alone version requires you manually configure your own web-server. 

 

There's some other alternatives as well, one that I use is FileBrowser since it's a bit easier to setup (the docker container actually works well) and simpler to use due to the fewer features, though that's far from the only ones that you can consider. 

[whispous]

Nextcloud!

 

https://nextcloud.com/files/

[jsnotlout1]

12 minutes ago, RONOTHAN## said:

NextCloud is the go-to version for this, it has most of the same features as the G-Suite (obviously file management, though it also has Docs/Sheets/etc. equivalents, calendars, and some other add-ons). It isn't that hard to setup either, though if you weren't comfortable with the CLI I wouldn't really recommend it as the docker app has pretty bad performance issues and the stand-alone version requires you manually configure your own web-server. 

 

There's some other alternatives as well, one that I use is FileBrowser since it's a bit easier to setup (the docker container actually works well) and simpler to use due to the fewer features, though that's far from the only ones that you can consider. 

how difficult would the manual web server config be? (thanks for the suggestions)

[RONOTHAN##]

28 minutes ago, jsnotlout1 said:

how difficult would the manual web server config be? (thanks for the suggestions)

For the most part, you copy commands off the NextCloud website (they do have tutorials on how to set it up with IIRC an Apache webserver). I think I remember spending an hour faffing around trying to get it setup for my server before eventually getting it to work (though I forget how much of that was figuring out that the docker version was unusably slow), having to bounce between two or three different tutorials that were all linked together. 

 

It's not that bad, but don't think you'll get it setup in under 5 minutes. It'll take way longer to setup than it takes to setup something like a Plex/Jellyfin server.

[jsnotlout1]

5 minutes ago, RONOTHAN## said:

For the most part, you copy commands off the NextCloud website (they do have tutorials on how to set it up with IIRC an Apache webserver). I think I remember spending an hour faffing around trying to get it setup for my server before eventually getting it to work (though I forget how much of that was figuring out that the docker version was unusably slow), having to bounce between two or three different tutorials that were all linked together. 

 

It's not that bad, but don't think you'll get it setup in under 5 minutes. It'll take way longer to setup than it takes to setup something like a Plex/Jellyfin server.

Got it, I may try it at some point but file browser looks a lot simpler. I dont really need the best of the best, just something like file browser

[RONOTHAN##]

8 minutes ago, jsnotlout1 said:

Got it, I may try it at some point but file browser looks a lot simpler. I dont really need the best of the best, just something like file browser

Yeah, FileBrowser is definitely a lot more straightforward in that regard. It's 1-2 commands if you're using the docker container (I'd recommend you do, especially if you already have docker setup somewhere on your server), change the password, turn on dark mode, figure out how you'll access it from outside the network (assuming you will), and you're done. I'm running both on my server for different tasks (FileBrowser handles my Jellyfin library management, NextCloud handles personal files) and they're both great at what they do when they setup. If I need to setup one for something else and I can get by with FileBrowser though, that's almost certainly the one I'll try to use first. 

[jsnotlout1]

2 hours ago, RONOTHAN## said:

Yeah, FileBrowser is definitely a lot more straightforward in that regard. It's 1-2 commands if you're using the docker container (I'd recommend you do, especially if you already have docker setup somewhere on your server), change the password, turn on dark mode, figure out how you'll access it from outside the network (assuming you will), and you're done. I'm running both on my server for different tasks (FileBrowser handles my Jellyfin library management, NextCloud handles personal files) and they're both great at what they do when they setup. If I need to setup one for something else and I can get by with FileBrowser though, that's almost certainly the one I'll try to use first. 

I have docker so I'll use that, but I'm also always up for the tedious installs otherwise lol. And my server SHOULD be secure enough to open it up to the outside. Do you have any tips for that though, To make the server mores secure?

[RONOTHAN##]

7 hours ago, jsnotlout1 said:

And my server SHOULD be secure enough to open it up to the outside. Do you have any tips for that though, To make the server mores secure?

I'm probably not the right person to ask about that. Doing a reverse proxy should help improve security, though I'll let someone more tuned into the cyber security space give a bit more recommendations. 

[jfmonty2]

Nextcloud seems to be the "market leader" in this space, as it were. I've also seen frequent recommendations for Seafile and FileRun, and of course there's OwnCloud which I think Nextcloud was forked from?

 

Personally I use Syncthing, it bills itself as more of a peer-to-peer syncing tool but I just run it on my server and point all my clients to it, so it's more of a hub-and-spoke topology.

 

If you do go with Nextcloud, I would highly suggest taking a look at the Linuxserver.io image for it. I haven't used it myself but in my experience LSIO images are often by far the easiest to set up and manage, even if there's a first-party image/recommended setup.

10 hours ago, jsnotlout1 said:

I have docker so I'll use that, but I'm also always up for the tedious installs otherwise lol. And my server SHOULD be secure enough to open it up to the outside. Do you have any tips for that though, To make the server mores secure?

The #1 thing of course is just to make sure that you can't ssh into it with a weak password, because you will get bots looking for exactly that. Last time I had an open port 22 I think I saw about 1 failed attempt per minute. These days I just don't even open a public port for ssh and talk to it exclusively over Tailscale.

 

After that I'd say the most important thing is to keep everything up to date, because you also get people who watch for security patches to widely-deployed software (Wordpress is the biggest target, but there are plenty of others) and then go looking for older versions in the wild where they can be exploited. Definitely a fan of Docker here, because in my experience it makes it really easy to automate updates.

 

After that it just becomes a question of limiting the blast radius if something does get exploited. Running in Docker is good for this too, although I think a determined attacker can usually break out of a container if they try. A VM would be more secure, but much more of a pain to administer, so it's questionable whether it's worth it. The other big thing to watch out for is internal network access, i.e. if someone pwns one application do they then have more network access to others that you're running? This is especially bad if e.g. you're running something else that uses Redis unsecured (which is very common in my experience) and the pwned application can talk to the Redis instance, because people love to store things like session tokens in their Redis caches. So if an attacker can talk to your Redis, it's usually game over.

 

And of course HTTPS is table stakes for anything that involves passwords.