If you want a cloud-based file synchronisation and sharing platform you are really spoiled for choice; but one downside that Google, Microsoft, Dropbox and pals all share is that they’re all controlled by somebody else.
If you want full control over your own data and don’t mind running your own infrastructure to do it then two of the biggest players you’ll come across are ownCloud and Nextcloud. What are the differences between these platforms, and which is best for you? Stay tuned, and let’s find out!
I guess the first question to ask is: why, when many companies are moving to the public cloud, would you want the complexity of running your own private file sharing platform? Honestly, this isn’t for everyone. Particularly when the likes of Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace come with working solutions straight out of the box; but there are reasons why doing it yourself can make sense.
The first is cost. Unsurprisingly it’s often cheaper to do it yourself than pay someone to do it for you — assuming you have the capability to do so. This is a particularly big reason why hobbyists and home users do it — they don’t have enterprise budgets to play with. It’s the main reason I started using these solutions, myself.
I used to use Windows Live Mesh to keep my files in sync between different devices at home. That’s been dead a while now so if you’ve never used it, it was a free peer-to-peer file synchronisation tool that sync’d between devices locally or over the internet. When Microsoft came out with OneDrive (then called SkyDrive) they discontinued Live Mesh and announced SkyDrive as a new tool to sync your files. Which meant it always went over the internet and now you had to pay for the cloud storage even if you didn’t want the data to be stored online in OneDrive.
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