Raspberry Pi and a Personal Cloud

Google knows a lot about me. And they have a lot of my stuff. And I keep giving them more of my stuff. I have watched the "free" allotment of storage slowly dwindle down. 15GB seemed like such a large amount years ago. It wasn't enough for my photos, so now I pay Apple to keep some of my stuff too.

It seems everybody has my stuff, and they all seem to want to make my life better by doing lots of AI stuff with my stuff. OK, I won't go too far down the tinfoil hat path, but one of the projects that I have wanted to work on with the Raspberry Pi is my own personal cloud storage.

This past year, I discovered Nextcloud. It is a branch of ownCloud, a self-hosted cloud product I looked into years ago. ownCloud and Nextcloud have come a long way, and offer way more than simple cloud storage. Nextcloud is the free choice between the two, and has a more active developer base, so it seems the clear choice for my project.

The question is, is the Raspberry Pi powerful enough to host my own personal cloud?

In short, yes. It should be noted that I have the 8GB RAM version of the Raspberry Pi 4B, but it seems others have Nextcloud running on various Pi models with less RAM. Also, the built-in document editing application servers (similar to Google Docs or Office 365) do not presently work on ARM processors like the one in the Pi. OnlyOffice says they want to support it, so maybe someday we'll see that happen.

I haven't fully tested all of Nextcloud's apps on the Pi yet, but basic document and photo storage is working great. As Nextcloud's page says, "Regain control".