I love taking pictures. My first photos were all still analog. As soon as digital cameras became affordable and the quality was good enough, I switched. And digital photography brings a need for storage. For years I wasn’t willing to pay anyone to host my pictures. I just bought hard drives, stored my images and videos, and kept them backed up. But at some point I had to be honest with myself: local storage is risky, backups or not.
So at one point reason set in, and my search for cloud storage began. I tried not to leave my whole digital fingerprint with one provider. Google already had plenty: I used it for work and on my phone (Android). So instead of putting my pictures there too, I went with Microsoft. It was also a question of price and convenience. OneDrive integrated well enough with my Windows machine, and it kept my photos off Google. I ran with that for quite a few years.
But then my 1TB of Microsoft storage started to fill up. And my unease grew: by then all my personal data sat on Microsoft servers (yes, I backed up other things there too). So I went a completely different way. I didn’t just move to a German provider; my partner and I decided to host our own storage. I mentioned that in my previous post. Choosing what to use was easy: a number of friends had recommended Nextcloud to me. The platform is one of the bigger open-source options, with a lot of users: Germany’s federal IT service runs it for around 300,000 staff, among others, on its own servers.
Yes, we host Nextcloud on our own infrastructure, so it costs us almost nothing. That does take knowledge and time. Nextcloud also works with partners who host it for you. The prices are reasonable: Tab.digital, for one, gives you 8 GB free, and 128 GB runs about 7 euro a month. I have not used a hosted plan myself, so if you have, get in touch.
For now, this is my last storytelling piece. My next one will actually look at what Nextcloud is, what I like, and what I don’t. But it mattered to me to explain how randomly I have often made decisions about software that holds very private, personal data. Often it was my own laziness, and a lack of alternatives, that pushed me toward software that was not really ideal, even though I knew better. I am convinced it is never too late to change direction. And maybe my post helps someone try a different app, or at least decide a little more consciously.