How to 'cloud first' your user files?

Ok all you Cloud Native Citizens, I’m part way through immigrating to your fine nation. I’m set up happily as far as my programs and apps go, and okay with dev files because of git & fossil, et al, but how do you folks handle user files like documents and so on? How are you making those cloud native? Easily available across all the machines you use regularly?

There’s Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, Next Cloud, SyncThing, … I see conversations on setting up each of them with varying degrees of faffery. Which of these in your experience has the fewest papercuts? Or maybe none and there’s another happier path?

It really depends on the device and what I am storing.

For configuration files, I use Chezmoi (install with Brew). You basically centralise all your configs into one folder which you then sync to GitHub. This for me is a new workflow currently, as if feels rather manual, but it’s nice to have specific configuration files available if needed, rather than having to sift through a normal back up.

Because I play around with virtual machines, Chezmoi + Git is a really fast way for me to set them up like my host machine. So I can keep making my custom Ublue images and break everything to my heart’s content.

That said, I also have a back up running weekly for home folder (that’s local).

For emails I don’t even download them, I just access them through the browser.

I don’t sync my PC to cloud, but depending on which desktop environment you are using you can potentially log into service providers like Google and Microsoft – easier to do on Gnome, KDE’s Google integration is currently broken. There are workarounds but they either hijack someone else’s API or they need to be reset every couple of weeks so neither is ideal. As this is Bluefin, I take it you use Gnome.

There is a program called rclone that supports lots of cloud services as well. IIRC that’s also available via Homebrew.

I do selectively save documents to my cloud provider (which isn’t any of those companies), but I do that manually, I just don’t need that 24/7 back up for those files.

thanks for the Chezmoi idea, I like that.

Hopefully other folks chime in in the docs front. I’m currently using Onedrive (adpated from Installing OneDrive in Fedora Silverblue-Bluefin, via brew + GUI and System Tray icon) but I’m not entirely confident in it as I have to monitor and manage it’s running state more than I want. (And I’d like to lessen my dependence on keeping that subscription active.)

All my Docs lie in a cloud and I recently moved from Google to Koofr (1 TB lifetime plan). Koofr is integrated via rclone mount (automatically mounted at start via systemd).

For my dotfiles and currently don’t have a backup. I only copy the content of a few into my personal notes. @Xariann thanks for pointing us to Chezmoi, that looks good.

Nice avatar btw. I also practiced Aikido for five years.

1 Like

I hadn’t heard of Koofr, I’ll check them out.

Aikido: thanks, I’m pretty hooked. If you ever come up to the Yukon feel free to drop in no matter how long it’s been since last on the mat. ; -)