Hey folks, over the past years I changed all my stuff step by step from big tech to open source and europe alternatives. I came from Google Workspace to iCloud with advanced protection to Proton to kSuite. (I left Proton cause of the lack of webdav, caldav, carddav)
I did this with all my stuff. From Instagram, X, Facebook, to Fediverse. And I like it.
Now I heard that Swiss is planning to add laws which are able to identify me, even as a German, and have all the rights to read my drive stuff if they want to. It’s not possible for me to trust them anymore.
So they choice is really thin out there. I could host my own NextCloud instance, and I did A LOT of times on my webspace and every time an updates comes, it brakes and I loose all my stuff. I don't want this and I don't want the overhead to fix this stuff or make sure, I can go back. 99% of all updates didn't even let me login anymore. No login at all. Whatever ... I thought about a NAS. Before the NAS, there is an OpenWRT router with AdGuard Home and Wireguard VPN.
So. Is this the end for my chase of a trustworthy Contact, Calender, Drive? If I buy this, I am on the most independent stuff possible? (I don't want a big server or something like this - I just want to settle down and don't switch companies because their country decided to get the next NSA).
And if so: Which one is good in terms of privacy? Synology? QNAP? I would buy a 2 bay NAS where one drive is the clone of the other, so I can change drives, if one is dead, without worrying at all.
Thanks for reading, excuse me for my bad english, and thanks for your ideas in advance.
If that's all you're after (Contact, Calender, Drive) you may well be able to just plug a hard drive into your OpenWRT router (it has https://openwrt.org/packages/pkgdata/radicale2 which does caldav and carddav), work out sharing (apparently at least samba works) work out how to back up the drive (plug in two, mirror and unplug one, RAID is not a backup) and call it a day. I don't have one, but it seems likely doable... Tailscale in when you're out and about...
This is what I use. Openwrt with a USB HDD attached to it. Radicale2 deals with caldav stuff. Samba4 shares the HDD over the network. Zerotier gets me connected to the home network when out and about. Syncthing on my router and phone. When I charge my phone it automatically backs up my pictures and documents folder into the HDD. Separate offline copy of the HDD every few months for backup. Not as fast or dedicated as NAS but cost effective solution. Openwrt solves most of my networking needs.
This sounds awesome! My OpenWRT Router is arriving on monday, maybe this post in general will be obsolet -_-"
All of this stuff uses up a lot of space, around 200MB, which is greater than the standard root partition size in Openwrt. I run it on an x86 box (PC Engines APU2) and the internal SSD is 16GB. Every update I needed to expand the root partition size to be able to fit all the packages previously installed. I now build my own images with expanded root partition to avoid the hassle.
This post and it's comments are likely helping lots of people either way! :) I know I've learned some things from it.
Perfect!