Episode: 3154
Title: HPR3154: Make NextCloud your next cloud
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3154/hpr3154.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 17:52:41

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3154 for Thursday 3 September 2020. Today's show is entitled,
Make Next Cloud Your Next Cloud. It is hosted by Paul Quirk,
and is about 13 minutes long, and carries a clean flag. The summary is,
I go into my reasons for using Next Cloud, what it is, and why you might want it.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by AnanasThost.com. Get 15% discount on all shared hosting
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.
Hello, good listeners of Hacker Public Radio. Paul Quirk here today to talk to you about one of my most favorite open source projects.
And that project is Next Cloud. I want to tell you all about Next Cloud because I think it's just awesome.
Let me start this by taking you back to the beginning of my own experience with Next Cloud.
Three years ago, I built a new powerful PC for editing 4K videos from my drone and running games on Linux.
My old computer was an HP Compact DC7800 small form factor that was refurbished.
When I originally bought it, my goal was to create an affordable gaming PC,
and after I added a low profile video card, maxed out the memory, and upgraded the hard drive,
it could play Half-Life 2 episode 2 quite competently. However, it would struggle whenever I wanted to edit 4K video files.
It was still a good computer, so I wanted to put it to use, and so I installed Ubuntu Server Edition to host my own web page,
since I pay for an always on high speed unlimited internet connection.
During the setup of Ubuntu Server, it offered to install extras for me, and one of them was Next Cloud.
It sounded interesting, so I decided to install it.
If you wanted to know what Next Cloud was, you might gather from the name that it's a self-hosted cloud service.
If you did a search, the description at Next Cloud states that Next Cloud is a suite of client server software for creating and using file hosting services.
These are very understated descriptors of what Next Cloud actually is, at least to me.
My best answer to someone who has never seen Next Cloud before is that it's a self-hosted web-based platform that provides a foundation to provide you with everything that services like Google provides, and it can even run from a Raspberry Pi.
Moreover, it is scalable, enterprise-grade software, not some half-baked project destined to be abandoned.
This makes playing with Next Cloud a worthwhile hobby that could be monetized.
Today, my Next Cloud instance runs on a Raspberry Pi.
By the end of this podcast, I hope you will be motivated to try out Next Cloud as your own personal cloud.
Upon first installing Next Cloud, you'll find that it is indeed a self-hosted cloud service.
You can install the Next Cloud app on your Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, or iPhone device, and you can sync your files between your devices and Next Cloud, including the pictures you take with your phone.
Now, you might say to me, but Paul, Google and Apple already do this for me. Why should I want to have my own self-hosted cloud?
I can tell you at least two good reasons why you'd want to do this.
The first reason is that your pictures aren't going to get the crap compressed out of them.
If you have an Android phone and are using Google's cloud to store your pictures, they will compress your pictures, which reduces the image quality.
With Next Cloud, the images that are backed up are as good as the data they were taken.
The other reason is, virtually unlimited storage. I connected an external 1TB drive to my Raspberry Pi, where Next Cloud stores my files.
If I wanted 1TB of storage with Google, I'd have to pay them $140 per year.
For $140, I can buy a 1TB drive, a Raspberry Pi, pay for a domain name for a few years, pay for the electricity the Pi will use for a few years, and have my own cloud
free and clear of Google iCloud or Microsoft configured exactly the way I want it.
I use the free automated open certificate authority called Let's Encrypt to obtain a security certificate for my cloud,
and then use the free open source program called CERTBOT to install and renew them.
Since the files on my cloud are synced between Next Cloud and my desktop PC, this gives me a layer of redundancy, which removes the need for a RAID server.
If my internet goes down, I still have access to my Next Cloud since it lives on my home network.
The Next Cloud web interface is very clean and sophisticated. Photos have a thumbnail, so when I click on them, I get to see them with Next Cloud's image viewer.
I also store PDFs on my cloud, and Next Cloud has a built-in PDF reader.
If I upload a video file, Next Cloud can play that video with its built-in video player.
I can share my files or folders with varying levels of permissions.
I can send a share link to people who do not have an Next Cloud account on my server, and set permissions like Read Only,
allowed Upload in Editing, or provide them with the option to File Drop, which is Upload Only.
I can set passwords and expiration dates.
I can share anything I want without restriction on size or content.
But wait, there's more.
If you click on the icon that shaped like a picture icon across the top of the interface, you get to see your photos in a grid of larger thumbnails,
making it easy to locate exactly the correct image you're looking for.
The Next icon over is the activity icon, shaped like a lightning bolt, and it provides a summary of all the activity that has been happening on my Next Cloud.
So far, pretty normal stuff, but remember when I said that Next Cloud is a platform?
This means that you get to install apps to expand the capabilities of Next Cloud.
Let me tell you what else I've installed for my instance.
The Next icon over looks like a speech balloon, and it's called Talk.
Talk is a chat video and audio conferencing app that uses WebRTC.
That's right folks, forget about Zoom, Teams, or all those other video conferencing apps with questionable privacy.
We're talking screen sharing, online meetings, and web conferencing without data leaks.
Participants can join and participate without needing to install an app or even needing an account on my Next Cloud instance.
I can send them a link, and they can join.
In this day and age, with everybody working from home, I'm surprised we haven't heard more about Next Cloud Talk.
Yes, it even works on my Raspberry Pi, though I haven't pushed it beyond two other participants yet.
Next icon is shaped like an envelope, and that's where we have the web mail client.
It connects to your mail server to provide you with an ad-free web interface for reading and composing emails.
It also allows email integration with the rest of Next Cloud for tasks like sending share links.
It's a really clean web interface that supports multiple mail accounts.
You can send and receive encrypted emails even using the mail-villope browser extension.
The next icon over looks like two people, and that's the icon for my contacts.
I can sync my contacts from my phone to Next Cloud.
A neat feature is the ability to generate a QR code to make it easy for me to share or add a contact to another phone or device that supports QR codes.
The next icon over looks like a calendar, and that's what it is.
It integrates with contacts, supports web, and you can invite people to your events.
Like every other part of Next Cloud, the interface is clean, uncluttered, and intuitive.
The next icon over, in my instance, is shaped like a heart, and that's called social.
If you haven't heard of a federated social media like mastodon and diaspora, think of them as being like Twitter or Facebook, but open and federated.
This means that, unlike Twitter or Facebook, you don't need to have an account on the service someone else is using.
Think of it as social media working the same as email.
You wouldn't need to have a Gmail account to send an email to somebody else who had a Gmail address if you're using, for example, a Yahoo email account.
If you're already on federated social media, I'm at Paul at cloud.peakwork.com and would love to hear from you.
The thing about Next Cloud is that there are a large number of apps that can be added or removed so you can tailor your installation to suit your needs.
For example, I was interested in keeping track of my location when I was doing service work, because I had to figure out where I had been and how long I had been there, so the company could properly invoice the customers.
Keeping notes seemed ridiculous given that we have tech to do this work for us.
I found Google to be unreliable, so I installed the app called PhoneTrack on my Next Cloud instance.
For my phone, I installed the OwnTrack's app and configured it to communicate with PhoneTrack.
With this, I was able to keep track of everywhere I had been, and since this data existed only on my own private and secure server, I didn't need to worry about anyone else knowing where I was.
This worked exceptionally well.
So let's go over some of the other apps you might be interested in.
I'm not going to go over all the apps since there are too many for this podcast.
Instead, I'm just going to go over some of the featured apps.
The first featured app that I'm going to configure and add next is News.
News is an RSS Adam Feed Reader that can be synced with your mobile device.
Another featured app is Maps, which uses open-street map and leaflet, so you can choose between a standard map, satellite view, topographical, dark mode, or even watercolor.
It works with contacts, so you can see where your contacts are located, and plan routing using either OSRM, graph hopper, or map box.
Your geotag photos can show up on the map. It can even show you where your phone is.
The next app is Tasks, and that's an Office type app where you can add and delete tasks, edit their title, description, start and due dates, and mark them as importance.
Of course, this syncs with Next Cloud Calendar, and anything else that uses CalDev.
Another app is Text, and that's a collaborative document editing app that saves files as markdown.
As an alternative, there is a Notes app, which easily integrates into third-party apps for Android and iOS.
If you want something more powerful, there is Calabra Online, which can connect to a Calabra Online server.
If you're working in collaboration on a project, then you'll definitely want to install Deck, which is a CAN band style organization tool aimed at personal planning and project organization for Teams integrated with Next Cloud.
If you're collecting information, and need to have users fill out surveys or questionnaires, for example, then you can use Next Cloud Forms for that.
Now, you might be wondering about the security of Next Cloud, and of course, there are apps to improve the security.
One option is an Next Cloud app that provides your installation with two-factor U2F security, for those of you who might wish to use a U2F device for authentication.
Alternatively, there is also an app that provides Next Cloud with two-factor authentication for TOTP, which is a time-based, one-time password algorithm.
I sincerely hope this podcast episode has given you a pretty good idea of what Next Cloud is capable of.
For me, my Next Cloud instance is my own personal safe, secure web portal, no need for ad blockers or anti-tracking plugins.
I can securely access my Next Cloud instance from anywhere in the world, where I have an internet connection, set up a video call, share files, and participate in the Fediverse.
It truly has taken the power of the modern internet, enjoyed by large, wealthy, and greedy corporations, and puts it in the hands of the people.
The community support and online documentation is great, which is a good thing because some of the plugins can require you to make changes to your server, like setting it up to use Cron.
You don't know what Cron is? Don't worry. When Next Cloud sees a problem like this, it gives you a notification.
You click the link, and it takes you to a Next Cloud document page that explains what you need to do in a step-by-step fashion.
Thank you very much for listening to this episode of Hacker Public Radio.
I sincerely hope that I have motivated you to try out Next Cloud for yourself.
As always, please make sure to drive safe and have fun.
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