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Ask HN: Alternatives to Google Drive?

14 points by wolpoli ↗ HN
With the removal of free unlimited photo storage from Google and the demise of legacy Google Apps for Domains. I expect that Google will be going after Google Drive/Docs/Sheets/Slides at some point.

Are there any solid alternatives to Google Drive/Docs/Sheets/Slides other than OneDrive/Word/Excel/PowerPoint?

19 comments

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themodelplumber
Have you already looked into Zoho Office? https://www.zoho.com/office/

It may also help to design a minimum spec to fit your needs, so you don't exclude anything that could work for you, in searching for broader platform-to-platform matches.

zodiakzz
Courtesy warning: Zoho is headquartered in Chennai, India. A country with an increasingly authoritarian government so it's a safe assumption that their government will have access to all your data. But this is important why? Because the regime is very incompetent with terrible security practices. Massive data leaks are a monthly occuring.
yosito
I've got a VPS with Nextcloud and Photoprism running in a Docker container. If you're savy enough to set it up, including backups, it's a pretty solid option. Haven't needed to spend much time on maintenance since I originally set it up.

If you're looking for an option that's free as in beer, I've got no recommendations for you.

xq3000
I wonder how many people would love to see you outsource a bunch of terraform/bash/dockerfile scripts for it
yosito
I started from the publicly available docker compose files for both projects, and my only tweaks were environment related customizations.
zepolen
Yes, god forbid you pay for a service you find valuable!
fsckboy
when you don't pay for something, you are the product.

When they still have it in mind that you're the product, but demand you pay? no way I'm signing up for that "deal".

erulabs
We're in the process of building an alternative to Google Photos over at https://kubesail.com. You can use it now with a spare PC, or buy our custom designed hardware at https://pibox.io.

Today we're prepping to publish our App to the iOS app-store, which will do local-wifi-photo-synching much like Google Photos, only faster (due to only transferring over local network, not the internet). It's going to be a long battle to catch up with hosted Google Products, but we're on our way.

As for Google Drive, apps like NextCloud (https://kubesail.com/template/erulabs/NextCloud) work really well, though they're not quite as slick as google products. For Google Sheets, there is https://seatable.io/.

Self-hosting software is coming along nicely. All it really needs to get as slick as Google products is more users and more money and more attention. We're hoping to provide exactly that by making it far easier to buy a "Google-Photos-replacement box" (PiBox + PhotoStructure) or a "Slack-replacement Box" (PiBox + Mattermost).

peakaboo
I think the coming years will see a push to move away from Google and these megacorps in general.

It will start with the nerds like us as always, starting to use alternative products and recommending them to the mainstream people who just use what they are told.

tenebrisalietum
As long as Microsoft offers some free use of storage and web-based office apps, Google will as well.

If you're looking for a self-hosted web-based office suite with a filemanager, OnlyOffice might fit your needs.

u2077
I haven’t tested this product at all, just happened to catch my eye a while back. However, it appears to be in the early stages of development. It’s open source and has similar features to google drive.

https://twake.app/#start

Unesco88
gofile.io for files is great.
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runjake
You should probably just pick a service and select a paid tier.

Anything free is probably going to go away once the service has acquired its desired number of users and wants to monetize. You’ll just be in the same spot again.

wolpoli
I guess you are right. It's much easier to just pay up than to migrate. That's what they really want.
d--b
Your assumption may be wrong though. Hosting photos is vastly more expensive than hosting documents. Google may loose a lot of users if they made people pay for docs and sheets. They’re still very inferior to word and excel.
akoster
http://box.com

Box’s free tier used to occasionally have 50GB for free offers but file size is limited to 250MB iirc. My family has been using their accounts when this deal was on a few years back and the file history recovery option helped in a pinch where ransomware encrypted both one of their PC + then connected external HDD backup data at once. Also though they have a new sync client “Box Drive” their legacy “Box Sync” client still functions without any major interface or major boot changes one has to learn or get used to (for now).

Update: Sadly no promos now (https://support.box.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043694774-Box-P...) but free personal account signups here with 10GB of storage https://box.com/personal