Personal Cloud

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Revision as of 06:02, 16 February 2018 by Antonizoon (talk | contribs) (Created page with "* Email - The keystone service. Everything depends on it. However, it was not meant to be centralized in Gmail, but for people and companies to run their own nodes. Also,...")
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  • Email - The keystone service. Everything depends on it. However, it was not meant to be centralized in Gmail, but for people and companies to run their own nodes. Also, 6 years worth of mail is generally only 5GB.
    • This isn't practical or secure for most non-sysadmins, so use Protonmail (free) or Runbox (paid), and make sure to use GPG encryption for end-to-end encryption if necessary. I mean just look at what happened with Hillary Clinton.
    • Personal Domains - DynDNS is free, but you need a real MX record to forward mail. Make sure your provider is secured with 2FA, or attackers could resort to redirecting your mail for password resets.
  • Calendar & Contacts (CalDAV/CardDAV) - The two most important organizers for how your life proceeds. Use CalDAV/CardDAV with Radicale or Baikal to host this. It's super easy on RPi or ARM servers. But it if you want more, try Taiga, Wekan, or Taskwarrior.
  • Cloud Storage (Sync & store) - File syncing and storage is another key cloud service.
    • Gdrive offers unlimited storage for more than 5 users, so you can encrypt uploads with rclone.
    • Syncthing and NextCloud can be used for self hosted RAIDs. You can have much larger hard drives, but that comes with the responsibility of maintaining them.
  • Group Chat - It's hard to choose group chat because generally society chooses it for you. Most secure is Signal and those based on it (Whatsapp, Google Allo). But the most flexible is Riot/Matrix, where you can host your own network, bridge to others, and use end-to-end encryption.
  • Password Manager - As you grow to have more accounts, they should use stronger passwords. But this is difficult to remember. Just writing them down or putting them in Excel spreadsheets is the bane of every security policy. But there is a secure encrypted password storage system you can use: KeePassX, Pass-tomb, Lastpass is great.
  • Bookmark Sync - Great articles to access or read later. Wallabag and Pocket are for offline reading, Firefox Sync saves bookmarks on browser, and Shaarli for just one person.
  • RSS Feeds - Still useful today to get news from little blogs, Medium style.
  • Firefox Sync - Can be self hosted but not really secure as a result.
  • VPN - If you don't trust your current outside network, do what most governments and businesses do: get an encrypted VPN tunnel into somewhere you trust, from a datacenter to your house. Your own router is good for this, especially an ASUS one which has OpenVPN built in.
  • DNSCrypt/DNSSEC - Generally won't be self hosted, but using DNSCrypt helps safeguard whatever you're browsing from the current network, on the VPN or on the go. (otherwise just the websites you're visiting is a major info leak).
  • Finance Tracking - Double entry bookkeeping and good records are crucial to businesses or taxation. Dump the Quicken, use MyExpenses/GNUCash and sync to WebDAV. Or use Ledger for plain text accounting, but with some modern sync and processing.
  • Maps - Google Maps is dominant, but it literally tracks your every step and has other issues. Give OpenStreetMap a try: you can save it offline by default, and you'll be surprised at the exacting crowdsourced accuracy.