Take the power (of my data) back.

So I have been rocking my own Nextcloud instance for a while.

I could say inspired by this tweet…

My personal #gdpr today, May 25th 2018: completed my project to get back all my data from @Google, @evernote et al and host it all by myself with @Nextclouders, #joplin and dozens of other @OpenSourceOrg tools that come with the same convenience but with real privacy. Check!

— @jurgenhaas (@jurgenhaas) May 25, 2018

…but that wouldn’t be true, as I installed it some time before that, and have tested/piloted it by then.

It’s a Nextcloud on one of my servers. It works. I like it.

I actually started writing this post a couple of times before and always somehow stopped. I want to get back into (the habit of) blogging, and believe me, it’s hard to reboot your inner blogger after a long (-ish) hiatus. (Also, I’m kinda used to blogging in Hungarian. It’s different.) But I also have this though process on how to get back some of the data privacy that we lost along the way, a thought process that may or may not be interesting to as many as 4 people, maybe even more!… So yes, this is going to be a series of posts, and to start and to push myself to actually finish one of these posts, here’s the first, impulsive one. Not going to abandon this, nooo. Focus.

I installed Nextcloud. I like it so far. I’m using it for my “own domain” email addresses at gergolippai.com and lipilee.hu (they are very hard to figure out; feel free to drop me a mail), but still struggling with how to migrate stuff over from Gmail. (Mental note to myself: write that fun story on mail migration.) I also need to find an easy way to migrate over my Google calendar.

I have already migrated all my files from Dropbox and deleted my Dropbox account. Google Drive is going to be a bit harder, this will probably be a separate post in itself.

I have a lot of other stuff that I still have elsewhere and I need to figure out how to migrate. Notes, photos, contacts, tasks — these are the most important ones.

I installed Nextcloud. I’m declouding (unclouding?) myself. I am embarking on a “digital unsformation”. I’m only at the beginning of the journey, but I like it so far — and hey, it’s about the journey, not the destination, right?