I migrated my writing and cloud document storage from iCloud to Dropbox last year. iCloud works fine, but it’s not a great fit when your primary computer runs Linux.

Dropbox, in contrast, has a pretty good Linux client that has been reliable throughout my time with the service. But Dropbox was always going to be a temporary solution. There’s no way I was ever going to pay for their Plus plan. $10 per month, billed yearly, for 2TB of storage doesn’t make sense for me. It offers way more storage than I need and the price is just too steep.

And that’s not to mention that using Dropbox means my data is stored on someone else’s hardware, which I’m not too fond of.

Besides, I have a collective 64+TB of storage between my two home servers — a 2018 Mac Mini and an Umbrel Home — it makes far more sense for me to utilize that storage to fill the role of Dropbox and take control of my own data to boot. So that’s what I did.

The obvious choice was to replace Dropbox with Nextcloud. I’ve been aware of it for years and have even had it installed a time or two. But, that was back when I was entirely in the Apple ecosystem and the need for something else wasn’t a high priority. Hence why it didn’t stick before.

I now have Nextcloud installed on my Umbrel Home. UmbrelOS makes for such a slick self-hosting experience. It’s easy to use, reliable, and approachable. If you’d like to dip your toes into self-hosting, Umbrel would be my recommendation. Nextcloud is available in the UmbrelOS app store and I had it up and running in just a minute or two.

Next, I needed a way to access it outside of my home network. There are a few options for this on UmbrelOS — including the ever-popular Tailscale — but I chose to use Cloudflare Tunnel.

I had to do some manual adjustments to Nextcloud’s configuration file to get everything working without errors — since I’m accessing the app through a domain name using SSL instead of through the umbrel.local hostname. But that only took a few web searches to figure out, which wasn’t too bad.

Now I have hundreds of gigabytes of storage available to me through a file sync service that I can access from any network on my iPhone, iPad, and my Ubuntu install. No meaningful storage limitations, no limit on the number of devices I can sync with it (like Dropbox has on its free plan), and so on.

The only major hitch for me was my writing setup. Unfortunately, the Nextcloud app doesn’t support all of iOS’ FilesProvider APIs that are needed for iA Writer to use it as a library source.

But luckily, I have another option. Rather than store my writing in Nextcloud, I migrated it to a private git repository on my Gitea server — also running on my Umbrel. With that, I use Working Copy on my iPhone/iPad to perform all of my git actions and edit from iA Writer.

On my Framework 13, I’m using GitFiend for managing the repo and Apostrophe for writing.

This means the sync for my writing is manual, but I get a bit more control if there are ever conflicts.

I’m pretty happy with the setup now. And for the future, I may take advantage of Nextcloud’s other functionality. It’s not just for File sync, there are a number of “apps” you can install that give you access to additional features — like notes, an rss reader, calendars, contacts, and more.

Moving my contacts from Fastmail to Nextcloud and my calendars from iCloud to Nextcloud are on my shortlist of migrations to consider. I’ll wait a bit longer before I implement that, though — once I’ve seen how reliable the file sync system long-term. But so far, so good.