With the whole Google Reader issue (not that I am a user), I got think – some of the facilities that I use on the internet could be taken away, without notice or have an ability to extract my data out of the applications.
It was time that I took some things seriously and roll my data back into my own controlled applications and servers. I was planning on doing this once the NBN rolled on by but with the Google Reader issue and the possibility that NBN won’t roll by due to the ‘I’m no Bill Gates’ lead noalition coalition possibly getting into governement, time was right to act on this at a faster pace and just put up with the speed hit that I will initially find.I started out with ownCloud 5.0, this was a huge mistake and a big waste of time. Even when following the documentation carefully, it just wouldn’t work on Nginx – though some have had it work, just to run ultra slow.
So this morning, I cleared the decks, setup my Nginx config file, dropped the old tables from 5.0 and removed the 5.0 data and web files. I simply dropped in ownCloud 4.5, ran the config and I was up and running.
The music streaming feature while performing other ownCloud functions works perfectly as does the Android app.
As per the ownCloud documentation, I also highly recommend using a SSL certificate for your ownCloud instance. You can pick them up pretty cheap these days, some free even. I picked up a couple of SSL certificates via a promo at GoDaddy.
Also, I suggest, if you are running it from your basement on a xDSL connection, coughing up for a static IP address. Even though you could perform the same outcome using a dynamic DNS provider, it is just easier to deal with – less complexity – and you don’t have to run any agents on your routers or webserver to have the updates occur.
If you are looking at bring your data back under your control, this is the perfect replacement for Dropbox, Google Drive or SkyDrive.