Hello!

Like many of you, I’m looking to reduce my usage of google services. Starting with emails, calendar, drive and photos. I have seen many alternative, but I’m not sure which one to pick. I have criterias that I don’t think are unusual but I often don’t find the information I’m looking for in their documentation.

So I’m looking for feedback on your experience to help me chose.

Emails I own a domain name I want to use. Being able to have a catch all email would be a plus.

Calendar No special need. As long as I can send invitation to people that are not using the same service it’s fine by me.

Drive I want to store my documents securely. Having a gdoc/sheet equivalent would be appreciated but is not mandatory. I also need to be able to share folders or documents with a link to view them.

Photo I want the solution to automatically sync the photo from my phone to the cloud like Google photos does. I can’t find this information on any service. At least, if it’s not automatic, it should be a single click. Photo sharing should be like drive sharing. I need to be able to create shared albums. Ideally it should have an application that could cast photos to a chromecast, but that may be a lot to ask for!

Backup I want to be able to regularly query the service for any new/updated documents or photos. Then I’ll download them and create a password protected archive to store somewhere. I really want to be able to do that automatically. So the service should have an API allowing that. If none exist, how do you manage your backups?

I know there are great self-hosted solutions, but I’m not ready to do that yet.

So far I’ve seen many providers recommendations for specific services, I could do with one provider for each services, but ideally I’d like to do everything in the same place for a practical reason.

I’ve been looking at Infomaniak or Nextcloud which seems to be a good candidates for me. If someone has feedback to share about them I would appreciate it!

  • pewpew@feddit.it
    2·
    17 hours ago

    I’m selfhosting my own instance of Nextcloud and I must say my experience has been pretty good. I mainly use it to syncronize my projects between my PCs and I’m using it as a Google Photos alternative.

    • Email I have never tried it but I tried Talk and it works really well.
    • Calendar I have never tried it but it should work.
    • Backup is one of the strong points of Nextcloud in my opinion, it tracks file changes and keeps old versions that you can restore anytime, just install the desktop client, choose what to sync (very important!) and it’s done.
    • Drive Nextcloud it’s fine for it but I’ve never extensively tried, you don’t actually have to use the official app to manage your files. I connected Solid Explorer to my Nextcloud and the experience is really good!
    • Photos You can use Nextcloud as a Google Photos alternative, although it’s a bit janky: The experience is not flawless because the Android client it’s a little buggy, I have to try many times before it decides to upload my photos.
    • pewpew@feddit.it
      1·
      17 hours ago

      You should really consider learning how to self host if you have time, Nextcloud does not need powerful hardware to run, I’m literally using an HP mini PC from 2016 that a company was throwing away (it has a 4th gen core i3 and 4GB of RAM, it has no issues running Nextcloud on Ubuntu)