this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
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The main cloud services don't even work natively (GoogleDrive, OneDrive, iCloud) basically the only mainstream choice is Dropbox. I tried to use Google Drive in Mint, and it's a pain to get it to work, and usually it stops working after computer restarts.

Someone has a recommendation about how to handle these services?

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[–] [email protected] 115 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I keep seeing this question pop up. "Why doesn't [closed/proprietary technology] work well in Linux?"

This question should be asked at whoever makes said technology. You are their client, why don't they support your operating system?

That responsibility should not fall on the shoulders of the thankless volunteers that do their best to create an awesome OS.

Alternatively you can buy one of the commercial distributions and become a client. Then you can ask your supplier why don't they support that technology.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

Case in point, Mega.nz offers a native GUI client for Linux and went out of their way to also make a full command line client.
Support those services that don't treat you like ass, y'know?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I agree! But it's surprising that even Google doesn't have a native app for Drive. There's one for android, but not for Linux? I'm guessing it all boils down to number of users,, but still...

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Google literally owns Android tho.

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[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you want cloud storage I'd recommend Nextcloud as a service (I'm not affiliated with them, just a customer)

Works like a charm. You can even install plugins. Also, there are other companies that provide hosting so there is no vendor-lock-in.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Can't recommend Nextcloud enough. I also recommend checking out self-hosting! It's ridiculously easy to setup with the example docker-compose files they have in their git repo. If you have a NAS or a machine at home, you can basically create your own online storage that's completely private.

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I second that.

With the additional advantage that rclone has modules like crypt and join, which allows you to keep your data encrypted no matter which cloud you use, gaining more cloud space by joining clouds, etc.

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (8 children)

Google drive integrates simply into the file manager on Gnome for cloud storage. It doesn't do offline file-sync between devices, however.

The Microsoft and Apple products don't support Linux because... Microsoft and Apple.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Google drive also works great on kde

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago

Rclone is awesome. Mega and PCloud got native clients that works great. Nextcloud is an alternative.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago

Nextcloud works great! Includes integrations with GNOME and KDE including taskbar icons etc. and you can pay a service to host Nextcloud for you if you'd prefer that to selfhosting.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I have a self-hosted Nextcloud and my Nextcloud account connected via GNOME as an Online Account. It integrates seamlessly with Calendar, gives me a webdav mount for my files etc. I don't have any issues. I have not added any Google accounts, and definitely no Microsoft accounts. I don't use public clouds for private stuff.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

rclone for cloud backup

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

MEGA is an optiom, rclone is the option. Supports next to anything.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Syncthing is pretty good. I've got a raspberry pi running it on my local network with an old usb hard drive I had kicking around and it works great

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Just to be clear, Syncthing is not cloud storage but file syncing. It can be used in a similar way but it does have different strengths and weaknesses.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (4 children)
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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Most people I know who use Linux wouldn't trust Cloud services cause that's just storing your stuff on somebody else machine. You can self hosted service like Next cloud on a raspberry pi or just get comfortable with networking enough to setup VPN and ssh into your home computer from the net to get your stuff.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (11 children)

A huge part of disaster recovery is storing things in separate geographic locations. That's not easily don't with self hosting. If all my stuff is on a file server at my house and my house burns down then I've lost all my files.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

While this is true, you can have a remote backup service that isn't the type of cloud storage the OP seems to want (that is, which isn't designed for editing individual files on the fly on the remote server, or synchronizing between devices). They're similar, but not the same.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I'm mostly talking about the "somebody else's computer" part in the comment I replied to. I don't think it's very feasible. I think self hosting stuff from home is awesome and think it's a culture more folks should check out, but to really have a proper backup of files they need to be stored in multiple different physical locations and that's not something that's cost effective for most folks. What you're talking about is still "someone else's computer" so not different from the comment above.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Well the thing is, I’m still not comfortable in opening up an attack surface like that. I would much rather pay for someone else to do that. Preferably someone who really knows what they are doing and keeps an eye on the constantly evolving security environment. There’s a bunch of other stuff happening in my life, so finding the time to play server admin isn’t that easy right now.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There are many professional Nextcloud holsters, for example: https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

For command line sync to the cloud you can use rclone. It's FOSS and works with many different cloud providers.

For a constant sync experience you can use insync. It's closed source and requires a license though, but works reasonably well.

Sorry for the lack of direct links since I'm on the phone.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

rsync/ rclone just works! Have not tried rsync with cloud yet, I use rclone for encrypted backups. Most cloud services are supported including google drive.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Mega and syncthing work perfectly fine for me

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Mega (Mega Upload) ain't bad, 30gb free. Worth a look!

I used them all, so I get plenty of cloud storage for free

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I also say that pCloud is possibly the best option. Simple install, free storage, and a cheap lifetime purchase for more storage. My only complaint is that they don't support aarch64 yet, but I don't need think there's really anyone that does yet so I'm living with offline backups.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Too many horror stories with pDrive about people getting locked out and never seeing their data again, and their terms lay it out that they own what you upload not you. That scared me away from pDrive.

I moved to kDrive and it has done everything I need so far. It's a little slow to transfer if you are in the US since their servers are in the EU, but that's a minor complaint and only a hurdle I had to worry about once during initial sync... It's hardly noticeable with everyday changed to individual files.

The Google drive integrations in dolphin / KDE work well enough but it doesn't have an option to "sync" folders in a local drive like the windows client did, and that was my main use case. Same with dropbox, you get one sync folder on your main OS drive. I have 8 storage drives in my computer and I have more data that needs synced and backed up than will fit on my main OS drive.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Don't. Use Nextcloud.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

rsync is your friend

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Syncthing has never failed me.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

the file manager integration with gnome and google drive worked well for me.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

My recommendation is to not use them, for privacy reasons.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I don't understand those questions. Google Drive is webdav to the best of my knowledge. Anyway, it works out of the with Gnome/Ubuntu. When you connect a Google account, a drive icon appears. Doesn't get more "native".

I get the problem that most vendors don't have an app for Linux, so some functionality is lacking compared to what you may be used to. And cross-platform anything can be a problem, i.e if you really need Linux Desktop + Android + Windows + Apple stuff. (I do and learned to use web-based applications for work.)

What do you really expect from a "Personal Cloud Storage"? not a clearly defined term.

Seafile (needs a paid server as the backend) works nice for syncing files. Google Drives works as network drive. There are tons of backup solutions that work with tons of storage backends (aka professional cloud storage).

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Someone has a recommendation about how to handle these services?

You don't. Apple is notorious for their walled garden approach. Microsoft has no interest in supporting Linux (why should they?). Don't know about Google.

I am pretty happy with pcloud. They offer lifetime licenses that are really worth it if you intend to stick with them long term. The automatic Backup works great and AFAIK they have clients for all major platform's. The android client could be better, but Windows and Linux works great. Don't miss any functionality and the connection (at least here in Germany) is fast.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Chiming in, is there a solid OneDrive client for linux that just works? No collaboration stuff needed for it or other fluff, just simple file sync. I pay for OneDrive family and would be nice to be able to sync files with other ecosystems (Synology, Windows, Android).

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There’s a commercial Linux client I was using called Insync and it was perfect. Only stopped using it because I switched away from Linux

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I have a Backblaze B2 account I use for other things, I recently created a new bucket on it and attached it as a drive using s3fs. Works fine as far as I can tell (I've not used it much - prefer to keep things locally and just back them up off-site, which is actually what I have my B2 account for), so you certainly can do this with an S3 (AWS) compatible service.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Because Linux is not a platform moneymaking capitalists choose to develop their apps for?

You have Nextcloud for all distros, Flatpak, Appimage. You have Syncthing which doesnt exist on iOS.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Seafile works well on linux

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I use kDrive and it works well with Fedora. Infomaniak, the company behind kDrive, is from my country, Switzerland. It uses a lot of renewable energy and the heat from their servers is used to heat buildings in my city.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I switched to linux (POP OS) as daily driver recently. Using selfhosted nextcloud and had 0 issues installing client and syncing. Didnt try google and other big guys yet

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Because it's a disproportionate amount of effort to natively support an extra OS (particularly one as fragmented as Linux), especially one with such a small userbase that largely isn't interested in using proprietary cloud services in the first place because of data privacy and security concerns.

Obviously not all Linux users are super worried about that stuff (I mean, I use Linux and have a google pixel), but on average the Linux userbase is way way more aware of that stuff than most users who just want their photos backed up without having to worry about it.

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