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Episode: 3232
Title: HPR3232: Nextcloud
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3232/hpr3232.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 19:15:07
---
This is Haka Public Radio episode 3232.4.
May 22nd of December 2020.
Today's show is entitled Next Cloud and in part on the series Privacy and Security.
It is hosted by Klaatu and in about 21 minutes long and carrying a clean flag.
The summary is, Next Cloud is easy, you should try it.
This episode of HBR is brought to you by an honest host.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HBR15.
That's HBR15.
Better web hosting that's honest and fair at An Honesthost.com.
Everybody, this is Klaatu here.
This is Dr. Public Radio.
I'm responding to an email friend who's by somebody and it's this person.
I was sure it was Kevin.
Yes, it was Kevin O'Brien.
And he's asking about Next Cloud, sort of a rundown on what Next Cloud is all about.
How it works, how it gets installed, what you can run it on and so on.
So Next Cloud is, I mean, this is probably very much what you would expect from a marketing
spiel, but it really is a platform.
Next Cloud is your home away from home.
It is a place that you can put that you can create online for yourself to go to.
And do all kinds of activities.
You can keep your calendar there.
You can write documents that were, yeah, text documents there.
You can upload your photos and sort of view photos.
You can use to some degree chat and video chat and all kinds of different app,
little apps in the Next Cloud environment.
I think there are probably about, I don't know,
15 different hacker public radio episodes on each one of those apps,
not 15 per app, sorry, 15 consisting of each one episode per app.
So anyway, that's, it's a big discussion.
But we may as well start at the beginning, which would be how do you get the thing?
So let's talk a little bit first about where is it from.
So Next Cloud is the, is the successor to a little thing called own cloud.
And own cloud, I have been using since where I was using way back.
I don't know, let's call it 2012, 2011, 2010, that time frame.
And I, I know this because it kind of more or less saved my job in a way.
I was at a work place that I worked at and they needed some like groupware.
They needed a place online where they could store documents and share documents
across the organization.
It was strangely difficult to find a really good open source solution for that.
I mean, there were open source solutions, but a lot of them were kind of structured around,
at least to my memory at that time, were structured more around kind of like the,
I guess, traditional at that point, just shared folders across a network,
which you'd think would be fine.
You think that would be completely workable.
But people for whatever reason wanted to live in their web browser
and couldn't quite grasp the concept that their data
from their workplace lived at their workplace.
That was, at that time, it was becoming old-fashioned.
That that was not something that was acceptable.
Now, I thought there was a strong argument that that should be the case,
but the management was a little bit lackluster there.
And basically, whatever people said they wanted, they were expected to get.
And so it was up to me to either implement a solution or live with the fact
that there was rampant shadow IT going on.
So OwnCloud was the solution to having all of your work files available to you
at all times, from home, from work, wherever you are.
You can log into the intranet and grab whatever document you need instantly.
And OwnCloud was the solution for that.
And then you could share that with someone else and so on too.
You could create shared folders, shared documents, and that sort of thing.
What OwnCloud at that time did not have was any kind of real-time
collaboration office software.
So I should just, I want to get that out in the open immediately.
And even now, NextCloud doesn't really have that built-in.
There is something called OnlyOffice, which is an open-source collaborative office suite
that can hook into your NextCloud or OwnCloud install,
but that is a separate topic.
And it's not one that I have experienced with myself.
OK, back to the original story.
So OwnCloud was a thing.
And then at some point, the direction that OwnCloud was going into
just didn't quite seem very, I guess, user-friendly or necessarily responsive
to what users tended to be asking for.
And so the creator of OwnCloud forked it into NextCloud.
And I have to say, it has been so much better ever since.
It's been an amazing, amazing project ever since then.
I switched over to NextCloud almost immediately.
And I used it daily all day at one of my other workplaces,
not the OwnCloud workplace, the other workplace,
where I installed it on a personal server of mine
and used it to access personal files at work,
not that I wanted to access personal files at work,
so that I didn't have to do my work.
My work was very fun.
But sometimes you want to make a note to yourself for something.
And instead of just emailing myself a dozen notes to myself
as I thought of them, I would document them in a notepad
that I had just kind of keep a running note to myself
on my NextCloud instance.
Or I would go to my NextCloud instance to check on a calendar,
a shared calendar that me and my partner share.
And she would upload or not upload.
But you know, add an event to a calendar
and my NextCloud calendar would then subscribe.
It would subscribe to that I calendar event
and it would show that event on my calendar and so on.
So it was a good little personal information manager,
management system for me for truly, truly years,
like three or four years every day.
I was living my entire personal internet experience
was within NextCloud.
If it seems like I am speaking really, really highly of NextCloud,
it's because I think very, very highly of NextCloud.
It is an amazing project.
And I think ultimately, no matter what I say here,
ultimately the way that you are going to find out
about NextCloud for yourself is to just give it a go.
Give it a shot, see if it works for you.
Obviously it'll depend on what you're looking to do with it.
And as with any project, the many different aspects of it
are in different states of development.
So for instance, NextCloud did, and I think, well, does,
does have video chat capability,
what with WebRTC technology and so on.
It's, I guess, relatively simple to sort of integrate that
into an online application such as NextCloud.
And they have.
It is far from perfect, however, at least when I tested it.
I was, I struggled to get phone calls going with it.
I tested it with a couple of friends
and we couldn't really get a group call going.
There were a lot of sort of bumps in that road.
But on the other hand, I mean, first of all,
that was a year ago now.
So I don't know for a fact that it is,
it may be a lot better now.
It might be a really great experience.
But at that time, when it was still relatively new,
it was a little bit troublesome.
But that aside, other aspects of it,
like the calendaring app and the text editing
and the markdown note mechanism that it has.
And all these other things that I use daily
are in great shape and have been for years.
So it just kind of depends on what you're looking for.
Don't necessarily bank on something
until you've tried it and kind of,
well, auditioned it, I guess,
would be the thing that I would do.
NextCloud also has a really nice sort of always
on integrated photo management system.
So if you have your NextCloud signed in on,
if you've signed in to your NextCloud
on your mobile device and your mobile device
as most of them do, these days have a camera on it,
then NextCloud will detect that you have a pictures folder
and offer nicely, I think, once to synchronize your photos
with your NextCloud instance.
So you don't have to send your photos up to iCloud
or what's the Google one?
Google photos, probably is what they would call that.
So yeah, you don't have to do that.
You can just sync it to your own NextCloud instance
for your remote backups or your synchronization,
whatever we're calling it these days.
Very cool feature.
So NextCloud, as you might have started to guess,
it is a little bit multi-platform.
So you can, or cross-device, I guess.
So you can put NextCloud on a server of yours
and we'll get into what kind of servers
you need for that in a moment.
Spoiler, it's less than you think.
So you can put NextCloud on a server,
I almost said spoiler.
You put NextCloud on a spoiler too,
but generally they run, it runs on a server.
And then you can install applications
on various devices to integrate with it.
So the most basic way to integrate with it, I guess,
would be a web browser.
I think intuitively or just sort of your expectation would be,
yeah, I've got a personal cloud somewhere out there.
How do I get to it?
Well, in a web browser.
And you can do that.
And it works great.
And the interface is responsive and dynamic.
You can log into it on your phone,
on your desktop.
It's a great little interface.
It works really well on whatever platform
you integrate, you access it over.
But there are other ways as well.
So there's a desktop application called,
I think, my, no, NextCloud client.
And that acts a lot like Dropbox or maybe Google Drive
or maybe some other equivalent.
I don't know the other ones,
but that kind of service, right?
Where you have a local folder on your computer.
It is bound to a server somewhere,
such that when you place a file in this directory,
in the background, it gets synchronized back up to your server.
Or if you've made a change on the server,
it gets synchronized back down to your computer.
Or if you've made a change to that file on another device,
it synchronizes through your NextCloud onto your other device.
So in other words, you've got that constant always
on sort of synchronization for your files.
And that's a huge feature.
I mean, it's brilliant.
I've used it in lots of different contexts.
I've used it for myself.
I've used it with other people who, you know,
we might be working on the same file,
not at the same time, but like passing, you know,
working on the same file at different moments.
And then when you turn on your computer in the morning
and that person has done their job the previous evening,
then you know that you're getting all of their changes automatically.
So that's quite nice.
That's the desktop application that I know of.
There may be others, but I mean, that's the one that I use.
Now there are mobile applications as well.
I get mine through FDroid on Android.
And they do things like, well, they can synchronize
to your NextCloud instance, certainly.
There's a chat application called NextCloud Talk.
There is a notes application called NextCloud Notes.
And so on.
Oh, a task application.
I think it's just actually called tasks.
Lots of different applications out there
for the different apps that are available in NextCloud.
Not all of them have a mobile component.
So for instance, I do have a calendar
on installed into my NextCloud instance.
And it is subscribed to various I calendar.
Well, I guess I calendars out there on the internet.
From lots of different places, it's the beauty of the I calendar spec.
But there's no, there's no NextCloud calendar app
for a mobile as far as I know at least.
But you can use some other calendaring app,
like ETAR is one that I found on FDroid.
And of course, you just subscribe.
You can just dump a subscription list
from NextCloud imported into your other calendar.
So it doesn't matter.
It's all the open specifications, open source data.
You can just use it in NextCloud.
And then if there's not a specific,
a NextCloud specific thing for whatever device you're on,
you just use whatever you're used to.
Thunderbird has lightning or whatever.
I think it's lightning, right?
That does the calendaring in Thunderbird,
K-Mail or contact, I guess, technically,
of whatever calendaring application you normally use
on your computer if you use one,
whatever calendar you use on your mobile, and so on.
So yes, you can use NextCloud on all manner of devices,
sometimes directly through a web browser and other times,
in a roundabout way through some kind of dedicated app.
And then still other times, you just use the same data
in whatever native application you're accustomed to.
Okay, so now let's talk a little bit
about installing this thing.
And it is a lot easier than you might think.
I have NextCloud installed on a VPS account.
So this is not a dedicated server.
Well, I should clarify.
I have a couple of different,
I have two different installs of NextCloud,
one for one set of people,
another for another set of people.
So one of the accounts is on a pretty good account,
on a nice server account that I have a fair amount of access on.
So that, I'll just kind of put there in that pile.
But there's this other one that I have installed on a,
yeah, it's just a VPS slice.
It doesn't have anything fancy.
This is just your run of the mill,
bottom of the barrel, maybe not bottom of the barrel.
Near the bottom of the barrel, kind of server account.
I've installed NextCloud onto it
because it is that easy.
As long as you can create a MySQL database on that server,
as long as you can do that,
or well, I guess technically on a server,
but it's gonna be easier if it's on that server.
So if they give you access to MySQL databases,
which I think most of them do,
even like the really dirt cheap ones,
typically have access to that sort of thing.
As long as you have a database, I mean, heck,
I haven't looked lately there.
You may even have an option to have something simpler
than MySQL for NextCloud.
But as long as you can have a database and PHP,
you're pretty much good to go for NextCloud.
And the way I do it is I grab the release of NextCloud.
I copy it to the Tilda slash public underscore HTML
directory of my little server account.
I untar it there.
So it's in its own little folder,
which I call NextCloud with no version number.
And then I link the one with the version number
to that folder so that I can get there easily.
You know, without typing in the whole version number.
So NextCloud.
And then you navigate to example.com slash NextCloud.
And you go through the setup process.
And it really is pretty much that simple.
It is, if you've installed WordPress lately,
it's basically that level of simplicity.
It's really, really simple.
You do have to point it to your database here.
So you have to know your database name
and database password.
But that's it.
Like that's all you have to do.
And everything else is basically automated for you.
It's just the simplest install you can imagine.
I even update.
Updating NextCloud doesn't require anything
beyond what installing NextCloud requires.
So if you were able to install it in the first place,
you'll be able to upgrade.
Here's how.
First of all, you want to put your NextCloud instance
into maintenance mode, which again, if you've ever used,
you've ever administered a WordPress site
then this is kind of familiar to you.
Maintenance mode, technically you can do with this,
the command OCC.
It is a PHP script that is bundled along with NextCloud
that you should be able to run.
But sometimes it doesn't quite work
because of ownership over who's serving this file.
So what I generally do is I just edit the config.php file
that you have set up now that you've installed NextCloud.
It lives in the config folder,
configslashconfig.php.
It was set up for you while you were installing
and entering locations of databases and so on.
So you may not have ever actually edited this file yourself.
Just know that it is there.
It's in the root directory of your NextCloud,
of your NextCloud install in a folder called config.
And it is called config.php.
You can search in that file for the string maintenance,
which would be set to false right now.
You'll set it to true just by typing in true instead of false.
Delete false, put true in, save it,
and now your NextCloud instance is in maintenance mode.
If you went there to try to log in,
it would warn you, can't do it, it's in maintenance mode.
Now, if you have a lot of users
and you suspect one of them might be using NextCloud right now,
then you would want to coordinate this with them
to make sure that you're not clobbering something
that they're in the middle of working on.
But assuming that you have all that sorted out,
place it in maintenance mode and then you download
the new release, whatever release it is.
You shouldn't skip releases.
You must release in sequence according to NextCloud documentation.
So you get whatever you iterate upon what you've got installed now.
You download the Next official release.
You can untar that release.
This is all done on your server, of course.
You'll SSH into your server, you're doing this.
You untar that directory and let's call that directory temporary.
And then you can copy that config file that we just edited
from NextCloud slash config slash config.php
to temporary slash config slash config.php.
And now you need to grab your data.
And this is quite important.
This is all of your, well, it's not all of your user data.
That's not quite correct because your user data
is in a MySQL database somewhere out there
that you're not really going to interact with during this process.
But some user data is there.
So you'll grab your user data.
And the data is in a folder, again,
in the root of your install of NextCloud.
It's in a folder called cloud slash data.
So you'll want to grab that cloud slash data folder
and copy it over to your temporary directory,
the one that you're upgrading to,
so that you now have all of your data
and your configuration in this new NextCloud location
that you're going to make active.
So once you feel pretty good about everything having been copied,
you can move the current NextCloud directory
to something like, I don't know, old cloud dash delete me
or whatever you want to call it.
And you move temporary to NextCloud
or whatever you've been calling your NextCloud install.
You call it NextCloud Cloud MySpace.
That's not a thing, MySpace.
Then whatever, you move it to the location
so that it is now the active,
although it's still in maintenance mode,
but it is now officially, you've renamed the folder.
It is now your new install.
You're not done yet, though.
You go into that folder, into that new folder,
and you execute this command, phpspace.slash,
OCC space upgrade.
Sit back and wait for it to do whatever kind of translation
of user data and configuration
to account for any new options and new features.
And when it's finished, take it out of maintenance mode,
open up that config slash config.php file,
set maintenance to false,
and now people can log in and continue to use NextCloud.
So far, it has always worked like a charm for me.
I've never had any problem with NextCloud upgrades.
And this, again, this is going over several, several years now.
It's been that simple.
And this has worked for me on the almost bottom of the barrel
server account, as well as my really nice server account
that someone is kindly donating to me
for my podcasting work.
So wherever you're running it, it is easy to run.
You can put it on a pie, run it there from your house.
You can put it on a server account somewhere.
As long as you've got database and php, you're good to go.
It's a beautiful thing.
You should definitely try it.
If for no other reason, just to try it,
it's really, in terms of installs,
I mean, it is literally downloaded onto your server,
untar it, and go to that location on your server in a web browser.
And just start stepping through the process.
And again, that process really only is,
point me to a database, show me how to access the database
and create an initial user.
And I think that's about it.
So really, really simple, really quick.
Give it a go.
Once you try it, you're going to love it.
So I encourage you to explore next cloud.
Thanks for listening.
I hope that was helpful.
Talk to you next time.
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