Hello!

Like many of you, I’m looking to reduce my usage of google services. Starting with emails, calendar, drive and photos. I have seen many alternative, but I’m not sure which one to pick. I have criterias that I don’t think are unusual but I often don’t find the information I’m looking for in their documentation.

So I’m looking for feedback on your experience to help me chose.

Emails I own a domain name I want to use. Being able to have a catch all email would be a plus.

Calendar No special need. As long as I can send invitation to people that are not using the same service it’s fine by me.

Drive I want to store my documents securely. Having a gdoc/sheet equivalent would be appreciated but is not mandatory. I also need to be able to share folders or documents with a link to view them.

Photo I want the solution to automatically sync the photo from my phone to the cloud like Google photos does. I can’t find this information on any service. At least, if it’s not automatic, it should be a single click. Photo sharing should be like drive sharing. I need to be able to create shared albums. Ideally it should have an application that could cast photos to a chromecast, but that may be a lot to ask for!

Backup I want to be able to regularly query the service for any new/updated documents or photos. Then I’ll download them and create a password protected archive to store somewhere. I really want to be able to do that automatically. So the service should have an API allowing that. If none exist, how do you manage your backups?

I know there are great self-hosted solutions, but I’m not ready to do that yet.

So far I’ve seen many providers recommendations for specific services, I could do with one provider for each services, but ideally I’d like to do everything in the same place for a practical reason.

I’ve been looking at Infomaniak or Nextcloud which seems to be a good candidates for me. If someone has feedback to share about them I would appreciate it!

  • Dariusmiles2123@sh.itjust.works
    4·
    3 days ago

    I use Infomaniak and I’m really happy with them even if everything isn’t perfect.

    Calendar: nothing to say

    Email: nothing to say

    Photos: It could be better as for now it’s just about backing up your pictures but you can’t do much else since your pictures aren’t analyzed for faces, objects, … Still it’s what I need and my pictures are safe

    Applications: on iOS the application is fine and on Linux too. The only problem is that I have to recreate all my synchronisations after every updates since it’s an appimage and not a flatpak. So I only update it once a year…

    I’d really recommend them as they are always improving stuff and their service is way better and cheaper than when I started using them.

      • Dariusmiles2123@sh.itjust.works
        2·
        3 days ago

        Yes they’re cheap but I’ve never had any failure and the few times I had to contact their support they were quite efficient.

        They are established in my city and they are a really well respected name.

        They are even heating buildings with their datacenters.

        I put everything on kDrive and once a year I do an external backup on a hard drive.

        For password management, I rely on Proton Pass though. It’s also a company from my country but their reputation is only into the tech world and not with normies.