Conquer the Cloud with Subutai Blueprints: Nextcloud – easy, flexible, secure cloud storage

By Subutai Community Manager Felipe Fonseca

At Subutai, we promote open source solutions that demonstrate the benefits and potential of peer-to-peer cloud computing. By using the Subutai blueprint for Nextcloud, you gain full use of the features of this file share and communication platform, and are able to store data in one or more locations of your choice.

Nowadays, we generate and consume a growing amount of pictures, videos, and audio files. It is a common issue that we end up with no place to store all of these files. Our smartphones get full and we transfer the files to a computer hard drive, which also gets full in no time. Some of us may resort to performing regular backups to external hard drives. But then again, how do we ensure that our data is not lost if we lose the hard drive or if it stops working?

There are commercial solutions to these issues that make the backup process easy for us. Think of those smartphone apps that can back up our files automatically. What’s good about them is that they store our files in the cloud. And, it costs us almost nothing to use these cloud storage services. So, is this the ultimate solution to our storage and backup issues? Probably not when we consider how easy it is for cloud service providers to gain access to our private files, constantly analyzing and cross-relating our content without even notifying us about it. True enough, the same app that sends our pictures to the cloud for backup can also ensue huge threats to our privacy.

One of the biggest advantages offered by the Subutai platform is precisely the ability to choose exactly where our data will be stored and accessed from. It could be in your own computer, in a friend’s or relative’s computer, or in one maintained by a provider that you rely on. If you want, you can create a cloud using several computers that are distributed in different parts of the world. You might wonder how security can be assured with this kind of setup. The advantage of using Subutai’s P2P cloud computing is that you can choose exactly where your application will run from. If you have sensitive data, you can install the PeerOS and run applications from your own peer. Alternatively, you can use those of friends or relatives, or peers provided by commercial providers that you trust.

I’ll show you how it works from a tutorial that I’ve prepared about setting up Nextcloud in someone else’s Peer.

⇠ Here’s the Nextcloud blueprint. I chose Nextcloud because it is an open and powerful solution that can be used for many ends, one of the more important being file synchronization. Drop by the Nextcloud website to find out about other features that you can use to your advantage.

Just some prerequisites before you start:

• Subutai Bazaar account credentials for logging in. To help you set up an account, take a quick look at our Getting Started page.
• PGP key set up in Account settings. For this, we recommend that you use our E2E browser plugin, which will generate and manage the PGP keys for you.

Ready to start? Watch the video and soon enough, you might find yourself setting up peer-to-peer cloud environments for friends and family, or even renting your own spare resources for others to use.

Once the new environment is built, you can gain access to a fully functional Nextcloud instance through your own URL. Take a look:

You can then use Nextcloud’s mobile and desktop clients to easily back up and synchronize your files. Enjoy it!