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How My Wife’s Subscription Purge Turned Me Into a Cloud Storage Engineer

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The Subscription Reckoning

Lately, everything’s gotten more expensive. Groceries? Up. Electricity? Up. Taxes? Somehow even higher.

That triggered my wife’s subscription cancellation frenzy. She looked at me and said, “Can’t you do something about it?”

Hell yeah, I can.

I opened my terminal and got to work.

The Setup

I had a few ingredients:

  • An old ThinkPad collecting dust — now running Ubuntu Server

  • A barely used external hard drive from my “maybe I’ll be a photographer” phase

  • Righteous DIY anger

I wasn’t just going to replace Dropbox. I was going to build something better — something mine.

Set up Samba shares for each user, mounted the external drive, and configured auto-mount in /etc/fstab.

We could now connect from our laptops using: smb://<server-ip>/me.

Boom — our own private Dropbox over Wi-Fi. With all the terminal windows open, I felt like a hacker in a 90s movie.

The Reality Check

I proudly gave the demo to my wife. She was unimpressed.

“It’s fine,” she said. “But that’s not why I use iCloud. I want the photos I take on my phone to back up automatically.”

She had a point.

I’d built a worse version of what we already had. Manual uploads? Who does that anymore?

We needed something smarter. Enter: Nextcloud.

The Real DIY Cloud

Nextcloud promised everything:

  • Automatic photo uploads

  • Browser access

  • Shared folders

  • Mobile and desktop apps

  • Zero monthly fees

I installed the required dependencies, downloaded the latest Nextcloud release, and moved it into place. Then I configured Apache, set up a database, and opened the installer in my browser at http://<server-ip>.

So far, so good.

The Brick Wall

From the browser? Perfect.

From my phone? Dead on arrival.

I could see the folders, but uploading anything failed. Nextcloud mobile just refused to cooperate.

I dug into logs, forums, app settings. Nada.

The Breakthrough

Turns out, it was one stupid setting.

On the Nextcloud app:

Media Access → Set to “Always allow all.”

That was it.

Once I flipped that, photos started flowing in automatically. Every picture we took was backed up to our home server the moment we walked through the front door.

Victory

Now, we’ve got a local cloud that works just like iCloud:

  • Auto-photo backups

  • Shared folders for the family

  • No monthly fees

  • Full control over our data

And best of all — my wife didn’t have to do a thing (I installed the app on her phone). Her photos just magically show up where they need to.

Epilogue

I went back to my weather app later that night — with a little server humming in the corner, quietly backing up our memories.