Good Bye, Dropbox

For well over a decade, I’ve had a really sweet setup for secure and reliable file storage. All the way back in 2013, I purchased a NETGEAR ReadyNAS 102, aka RN102, a tiny NAS enclosure with room for two hard drives. I slapped two Western Digital 2TB drives in the RN102, and it’s been running almost non stop, and without a single issue, since then.

One of the great things about NETGEAR’s ReadyNAS OS was that it was Linux based with the ability to install extra software. I installed NextCloud, a piece of open source software that handled, among other things, file-syncing. This enabled me to synchronize files and media directly from my mobile phone and computer to the RN102, which was very convenient. It was my own, fully featured backup solution.

Having a local setup for backups and file synchronization was great, but I ran the risk of losing everything in the event of something catastrophic, like a full blown house fire or an alien invasion. So I took advantage of another one of the RN102’s features; automatic Dropbox file synchronization. Now everything that was stored on the RN102 also found its way to my Dropbox account.

This was a double edged sword, however. I’d originally purchased the RN102 to get away from US based cloud services as part of my PRISM Break effort. But now I found myself getting sucked in again. The reason I decided to turn a blind eye to this particular fact at the time was that I’d amassed about 200 gigabytes of files, in particularly photos of my kids, and having everything automatically uploaded to Dropbox was a pro that outweighed the con.

But then along came Donald.

Hello, Germany

Ever since number 47 took office, I’ve tried my best to avoid American businesses and services. I’ve even made what I’d boldly call “life changing adjustments”, but that’s a story for another day.

The focus now was to find an alternative to Dropbox, a very American company, to which I paid well over 120 euros every year, money that would partly find its way into the current US administration’s pockets. The problem with finding alternatives to Dropbox, however, is that most of the viable alternatives are, well, also American.

But I was already using NextCloud actively on the RN102. What if it was possible to host my own NextCloud instance somewhere? A quick internet search showed that there are multiple companies that provide managed NextCloud hosting. After a bit of research, I settled with Hetzner, a well established German data center operator I’d never heard of. Their NextCloud hosting is done in Germany, and they support SEPA for payments, the latter meaning that I’m able to pay my bills without the involvement of American payment providers like VISA and PayPal.

Unfortunately, the NS102 doesn’t support synchronizing files to a remote NextCloud instance in the same way as it does to Dropbox. Also, it doesn’t seem like there’s an easy way to synchronize files between two NextCloud instances. Because of this, I decided to retire the RN102. The ReadyNAS platform has been abandoned by NETGEAR anyway, and having a NAS that no longer receives security updates connected to the internet is not a good idea.

So now I’ve turned off the NS102 and I’m using the 2TB hard drive I had laying around as a backup for the NAS-setup in my desktop computer instead. Every time I turn on the computer, which I do at least a couple of times per week, everything on the hosted NextCloud instance is synchronized to my computer. This setup is not as redundant as the one I had previously, but it’s good enough.

My cloud storage needs are now covered without a single American dependency¹!