The main cloud services don’t even work natively (GoogleDrive, OneDrive, iCloud) basically the only mainstream choice is Dropbox. I tried to use Google Drive in Mint, and it’s a pain to get it to work, and usually it stops working after computer restarts.
Someone has a recommendation about how to handle these services?
i have multiple google drives synced right into my file manager…like i just click it, it mounts it, and drag stuff in and out as if it were local…i’m on debian with gnome. dropbox works the same way. obviously icloud and onedrive may be more difficult, but i’m pretty sure there is something formsyncing up onedrive, but i choose to disable one drive on all my windows devices.
kdrive or nextcloud.
Google drive integrates simply into the file manager on Gnome for cloud storage. It doesn’t do offline file-sync between devices, however.
The Microsoft and Apple products don’t support Linux because… Microsoft and Apple.
Google drive also works great on kde
I managed to get one drive working on linux, able to mount it onto the filesystem using rclone.
Yes, it’s often possible to get unsupported services working, but it’s rarely simple and it’s prone to breakage over time with changes to the system as well as to the service. I do not recommend it to anyone seeking a simple solution and I will not do it for someone I need to support.
I sick of seeing Google Drive recommended as an alternative to dropbox. (Because I am looking for an alternative to dropbox and so far nothing has feature parity with it and the features I value.) If an app forces me to be logged in to a graphical environment locally on Linux then it has already failed to understand why people use *nix. Google Drive doesn’t keep offline copies and it doesn’t work on CLI. So basically useless on my server. If the files aren’t natively and transparently accesible as a local filesystem while they are synced to the cloud, it’s not a viable Linux Dropbox alternative. I want my files on my machine and a copy on the cloud, not the other way round.
GDrive has command line mount tools and works fine through rsync as long as you put the right tokens in the right places. Duplicity supports Google Drive as a backup destination, which is also quite useful for command line scripts.
Google doesn’t have any Linux clients other than their ChromeOS client, but there are plenty of tools that will synchronise your files.
I have not and do not recommend it. I simply responded to the claim that it doesn’t work, because it does. OP has something else going on that’s causing Google Drive problems.
I use both Dropbox and Mega and recommend either for someone seeking a simple cloud-sync solution.
Does it work offline? Last time I tried it only works when you are online
No, the Google Drive implementation is just for cloud storage. It doesn’t do offline file-sync. I’ll update my earlier comment.
I use kDrive and it works well with Fedora. Infomaniak, the company behind kDrive, is from my country, Switzerland. It uses a lot of renewable energy and the heat from their servers is used to heat buildings in my city.
Has anyone tried cryptpad.fr. I’m considering it, but I have yet to try it.
rsync is your friend
Don’t. Use Nextcloud.
I switched to linux (POP OS) as daily driver recently. Using selfhosted nextcloud and had 0 issues installing client and syncing. Didnt try google and other big guys yet
Pop OS had me log into Google and I believe my Google Drive space was automatically mounted. Too easy :)
It is too easy, but It probably got mounted as network drive so you dont have files stored on pc (bonus if you are low on storage). At least that was case with my nextcloud, so I removed that account and installed app from store. Both ways are super easy, iphone dificulty
Network drive is perfectly fine if you are ok with that (no internet = no files and it will open files bit longer), but OP was asking for synced files on local drive. I selfhost cloud and I prefer sync so I can have one more copy stored on desktop
For command line sync to the cloud you can use rclone. It’s FOSS and works with many different cloud providers.
For a constant sync experience you can use insync. It’s closed source and requires a license though, but works reasonably well.
Sorry for the lack of direct links since I’m on the phone.
You don’t need insync - most people just automate
rclone synccommands using whatever task scheduler their system runs by default (cronjobs or systemd units, typically). For those who prefer a GUI, KDE has a Scheduled Tasks app.On Android, you can use Round Sync which is a wrapper around rclone and can import the same configs.
Most people I know who use Linux wouldn’t trust Cloud services cause that’s just storing your stuff on somebody else machine. You can self hosted service like Next cloud on a raspberry pi or just get comfortable with networking enough to setup VPN and ssh into your home computer from the net to get your stuff.
A huge part of disaster recovery is storing things in separate geographic locations. That’s not easily don’t with self hosting. If all my stuff is on a file server at my house and my house burns down then I’ve lost all my files.
While this is true, you can have a remote backup service that isn’t the type of cloud storage the OP seems to want (that is, which isn’t designed for editing individual files on the fly on the remote server, or synchronizing between devices). They’re similar, but not the same.
I’m mostly talking about the “somebody else’s computer” part in the comment I replied to. I don’t think it’s very feasible. I think self hosting stuff from home is awesome and think it’s a culture more folks should check out, but to really have a proper backup of files they need to be stored in multiple different physical locations and that’s not something that’s cost effective for most folks. What you’re talking about is still “someone else’s computer” so not different from the comment above.
A hard drive in a bank vault is separated enough that nothing short of a nuke will destroy every copy of your data at the same time.
Have fun going to the bank every time you want to sync.
Multiple backup drives. Rotate every week or two. It’s not hard.
@JackbyDev @besbin my personal solution for this is an encrypted 16tb external storage drive I keep in my car. A copy of my server drive is made once a week. not perfect solution but doesn’t require much effort on my part
I walk through the woods on one side of my house, there is a shovel behind some trees I’ve marked. Then I go back to my house, down the other side of my property until I get to the river. Then I dig in the river bank until I get to a plastic bag. Double wrapped of course.
Inside the plastic bag?.. a collection of 1gb USB thumb drives and a note pad.
In the note pad?.. an index cataloguing what is backed up on each thumb drive.
Where do you keep your car?
@JackbyDev in a parking space on the other side of the road from my house, not far but deals with the whole house fire problem
Just sanity checking 👍
I guess it depends where you live, but I’d be worried about heat/freezing.
Well the thing is, I’m still not comfortable in opening up an attack surface like that. I would much rather pay for someone else to do that. Preferably someone who really knows what they are doing and keeps an eye on the constantly evolving security environment. There’s a bunch of other stuff happening in my life, so finding the time to play server admin isn’t that easy right now.
There are many professional Nextcloud holsters, for example: https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share
Thanks for the link. Recently, I’ve been looking into nextcloud providers, but somehow I missed this company.
If you need the online storage (or whatever self hosted service) just for yourself (and maybe some few people), it’s very simple to set up a Wireguard instance. My server doesn’t even show open ports to the outside world, but with Wireguard I can access my git, wiki, etc in my home LAN.
I haven’t really tried any of the second tier Solutions like Tailscale. But when you have more users or a more complex environment, that could help.Still, sharing stuff with “outsiders” would still be tricky, I guess - at least I haven’t found a solution…
Uh what? Lots of Linux users also use cloud services.
Pretty easy to use something like Cryptomator with almost any service and maintain privacy.
Self hosting can be great; it can also be a pain.
Syncthing has never failed me.
Try nextcloud
I have a self-hosted Nextcloud and my Nextcloud account connected via GNOME as an Online Account. It integrates seamlessly with Calendar, gives me a webdav mount for my files etc. I don’t have any issues. I have not added any Google accounts, and definitely no Microsoft accounts. I don’t use public clouds for private stuff.
I have a self-hosted Nextcloud and my Nextcloud account connected via GNOME as an Online Account.
The self-hosted bit is the problem. I have yet to find a Nextcloud provider that offers the service truly ready to go. The ones I found try to make it somewhat easy by offering Install buttons in web interfaces but if you have absolutely no clue about such things, even that is a hurdle to overcome.
Here is the official list of nextcloud providers that do the setup and maintenance for you: https://github.com/nextcloud/providers#providers
Considering that the list includes providers I’ve had first hand experience with and those are not ready to use: No.
Because it’s a disproportionate amount of effort to natively support an extra OS (particularly one as fragmented as Linux), especially one with such a small userbase that largely isn’t interested in using proprietary cloud services in the first place because of data privacy and security concerns.
Obviously not all Linux users are super worried about that stuff (I mean, I use Linux and have a google pixel), but on average the Linux userbase is way way more aware of that stuff than most users who just want their photos backed up without having to worry about it.
They could easily provide a cli tool or a docker app (which would work on every OS).
My recommendation is to not use them, for privacy reasons.
