[NBLUG/talk] Entering the age of dumb. Advice on cloud storage for my desktop stuff

Zack Zatkin-Gold zg at zk.gd
Wed Mar 14 08:59:14 PDT 2018


Most of the platforms out there are either built on open source software
or have evolved from a predecessor that was built on top of or supported
open source software, which means that you should be able to find a
somewhat full fledged solution to meet your needs, minus a feature or two.
 I recently set up all of these services (email, calendar, contacts, and
more) for myself and had little to no difficulty in the process.  I would
say that the biggest pain point was getting my outbound email to avoid the
spam folders of my recipients and also having to accept that some
functionality was lost.

Your approach to setting up these various services depends really on how
you want to start.  If you prefer to just dive in the deep end, I'd start
by spinning up a virtual machine on DigitalOcean or AWS which will cost
you upwards of $20/month.  Depending on which service you want to set up,
here are some suggestions for what to dig into if you want to do it how I
did:

- Email: Postfix (for mail transfer), Dovecot (for IMAP / POP3 access),
OpenDKIM (for security around email), SPF (another security related
feature)
- Calendar: CalDAV server (I use Baikal - http://sabre.io/baikal/)
- Contacts: CardDAV server (also Baikal - http://sabre.io/baikal/)
- Documents: WebDAV server (http://sabre.io/dav/)

One of the challenges that you'll face after you've set up your own
services is finding a client that works well with the service. 
Fortunately for email, a lot of the default clients across devices (e.g.
Mail in iOS) still support open source protocols.  You shouldn't have too
much difficulty with email (IMAP and POP3 are still supported).  Finding a
client that works with your Calendar and Contacts services should be easy
to find too as they are still built around the open-source protocols --
Calendar on iOS and Contacts on iOS both work well with my services,
though I had to make some tweaks to get more advanced features to work.

I might be able to provide some general guidance if you get stuck with
something specific on the above list I provided, though Google may be able
to find you a better solution too.

> Ideas about platform neutral, vendor independent, cloud based storage
> and applications for things like email, calendars, documents?
>
> Google docs and gmail don't fit, because they leave me tethered to
> Google and I am thinking in terms of persistence spanning decades, not
> days or weeks.
>
> Kendall
>
>
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