Such a good feeling cancelling my paid tier on Dropbox this week. I’ve been ‘playing’ at self hosting for a few months, and now I’m confident in my infrastructure and processes so I can start turning off some of the cloud things I’ve been paying for.
Dropbox has gone in favor of Syncthing over Tailscale in a hub and spoke arrangement to a VM at home. The main compromise I’ve had to make is on the iOS experience.
The next subscriptions I’ll be cancelling will be Evernote (I have so loved this over the years, but as they’ve added ‘features’ the app experience has degraded to the point where it’s no longer reliable to add notes from my phone). I’m currently trying Obsidian for this , but thinking about a simpler web markdown editor for mobile.
After that, all my Wordpress blogs will be coming home to my VPS, I imagine with some sort of static site generator.
I’d switch to self hosting, but the owners a real lazy son of a bitch
Hey congrats! If you’re exploring, I’ve had great success with the free tiers on sync.com (cloud storage) and notion (notes). I also have the iOS sad re:syncthing, which I use almost exclusively now.
If you want to try sync get yourself an invite from an existing user for free extra gigabytes. They’re a solid, sensible company and their free tier is more than enough for the few things I need handy on my phone.
I tried both notion and obsidian and for some reason notion just stuck for me. I like that I can share notes with coworkers. Ever note went down the tubes a few years ago, which was a drag.
Edit: reading that back I sound like a fucking shill. I do not get kickbacks lmao. Just wanted to share the programs that help when I can’t self-host.
reading that back I sound like a fucking shill. I do not get kickbacks lmao. Just wanted to share the programs that help when I can’t self-host.
The bots are becoming self aware 😰
They’re a solid, sensible company and their free tier is more than enough for the few things I need handy on my phone.
Care to share some examples of what you use it for? I’m currently using Syncthing to move a password vault and Logseq notes between my comp. and my phone.
I’m just looking for ideas really.
I use it for:
- documents I use regularly (contract worker so I’m constantly emailing the same things to accounting departments, etc)
- current contracts / union constitution and bylaws / published standards / some tables of data I regularly reference for work / stuff I have to reference for workers
- any “current projects” like a photo set for a project, plans and drawings, documents and literature for a vacation, etc.
- study materials if I’m going for any certifications, so my waiting in line time can be reading up instead of candy crush or whatever
Since my mobile is all ios and I otherwise use syncthing, I use sync.com for cloud storage basically for anything that I’ll want without having to get a laptop out.
I use Bitwarden for passwords and authy for 2fa so that’s all fine.
This also means I can zero a device and have access to this stuff once I load an app back up on the other side of a border, when that’s a necessary step. Not possible with syncthing.
I’m struggling to find where I heard about this, but if you post to Twitter (or I guess it’s X now) and tag @Sync, they should get back in touch with you and offer you a bonus 10GB for the positive outreach.
Since I don’t know about where I heard about the offer originally, the next best thing might be my post which Sync responded to as evidence of the bonus. Along with one or two other bonuses which one may have been a referral, I’m at 17GB on the free account which is pretty decent, and certainly not as burdensome as the referral process one has to go through with Dropbox to grow the free tier there.
They’re a great service from the time I’ve spent with it and worth a go.
That’s awesome, thanks for tip! I’m at 13GB and tbh it’s not worth 10GB for me to touch Twitter lol, but I’ll check out the other options.
Honestly I’m just happy to get the word out and support a cloud provider that isn’t (as far as I can tell) fking creepy. I like the company, I’m as confident as I can be in the security of the platform, and want people to develop stuff like that.
I had the opposite experience - bounced on Notion but stuck on Obsidian. I really like how Obsidian handles file management and how each note file is just a markdown document. I’ve moved from too many note apps to ever trust one with a closed system again.
For notes, I really like Joplin, fwiw.
Another longtime Joplin user here, but only until notesnook gets a self hosted option. You might check them out, too.
Another Logseq user here as well. I use syncthing to copy my note folder across machines. Pretty happy with the setup.
What do you do this off-site backup?
