I have a lot of self-hosted services, including Nextcloud, and by far the majority of my time spent on the infrastructure is messing around with new stuff and changing things for fun. Actual maintenance time is nearly 0.

That's really reassuring to hear! I'm planning to stick with this for a year or two to see what pain it actually causes me, but I could definitely see maintenance headaches being thing to motivate a switch to something else. Hopefully I have the same experience as you, though!

To be fair... I think the learning curve causes higher maintenance time cost at the beginning. But eventually you get stable infrastructure as code set up with good log monitoring and backups and you really don't have to think about it anymore. Any problems and you'll get an alert.

The infrastructure might be stable now, but could break with an update.

Very true. Which is why I don't do automatic updates except for security updates. 99/100 times, though, if I update a docker container the new one works just fine.

Yeah I'm a little worried about the maintenance burden, tbh. I'm not actually a linux/sysadmin type person, but I was pretty keen to achieve my goal of being Google free by 2021 (which I'm happy to announce with this migration that I did :), though I still watch youtube anonymously sometimes). But I'm not sure it'll be the most ideal solution for the long term. I'll see what the maintenance burden actually is like through next year. Some folks have suggested looking at the docker installation options (as opposed to the snap package, which I use here), since it's apparently really easy to maintain. We'll see.

One option which is what I've been doing is just using SFTP.

I find that that reduces the maintenance burden to just keeping a machine running and patched.

I also set up a read-only web frontend with NGINX's directory indexing + htaccess so I can share files easily.

A client that works really well with SFTP is lftp. It is in most linux distros and is available for mac in brew and in cygwin for windows. It has a mirror subsystem that works nearly like rsync and can support SFTP + chroot. Combine that with rsnapshot for diffs and you can fall back to earlier versions without using a lot of disk space. You can put that rsnapshot location outside of the SFTP chroot so that malicious access can't wreck your data, or just make the directory above your rsnapshots root-only access so regular users in a non chroot environment can't get there.

That sounds super nice, I'll have to look into it.

Thanks!

This is also the direction I'm taking. It makes everything just easier when everything is file-driven, backups are simpler, and when nothing works anymore the basics always work.

I think buying a NAS with all the built in software you need is a more sensible approach for the average enthusiast. But nextcloud is cool too.

I can attest that -even with kids- this is almost set-and-forget.

  sudo docker run -d --restart=always -v <LOCAL_PATH_TO_NEXCLOUD_DATA>:/var/www/html --name nextcloud --network=host nextcloud

If you want to get fancy with a MySQL database just make:

  sudo docker run -d --restart=always -v <LOCAL_PATH_TO_MYSQL_DATA>:/var/lib/mysql --name=mysql --network=host -e MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=hunter2 mysql

> Time cost of these setups is real.

Compared to the maintenance cost of something equivalent 10 years ago, it's a lot better now. I don't find it meaningfully inconvenient, even with kids.

I hear your point (2 young kids) and there’s plenty of things I’ve done that with, but this isn’t one of them. I have a Synology NAS and probably spend less than 5 mins a month on it.

You can even run Nextcloud on your Synology NAS with a Docker container (provided that your model is one of those that supports Docker)

I think synology NAS are great, and thats exactly what they are designed to do.

My problem with them is, i don't need as much storage and would orefer more CPU

Synology has this habbit of equipping their lower end models eith too little RAM and underpowered CPU

It is also harder to share it, as the 'owner' can usually see all data thats in it

To respond to a few points, my calculation was thus:

1) could I fail to detect a failure of an auto-update or novel exploit because I’m more busy now?

2) if so, could something very bad happen?

I got two “yes”s. It still annoys me to have everything in iCloud, but I also have local copies so I’m not too stressed about account lock out.

Otherwise to each their own, it wasn’t an easy decision to give up the autonomy, but the risk/reward equation changes when my time became more scarce.

You could have local copies of what you had in OwnCloud too, so I don't understand the point of going to iCloud.

Apple Pays very competent people to keep everything online. My major issue is syncing across several devices. Also, backups on premise aren’t really backups, so you still have to trust somebody even if it’s just keeping the link up in a VM.

I use ownCloud and I log into my Digital Ocean VM running Debian about once a week to do `apt update && apt full-upgrade`. Doesn't feel like major drain of my time.

Have you considered using the unattended-upgrades package?

I have, but I like keeping an eye on things.

Snap has auto update. So this shouldn’t be a problem here. Only the restarts are manual (to apply the update).

However, the time cost may be substantially lower than if Google or Apple locks you out of your account ...

why not put it behind VPN?