We welcome this development, as this is a first step towards investigating the anti-competitive behavior of Microsoft with regard to OneDrive bundling and other gatekeeping actions. Rapid developments in AI only serve to strengthen the need for oversight, as the Bundeskartellamt itself also points out.

Since the initial complaint to the European Commissions’ Directorate-General for Competition, Microsoft has continued to limit on the freedom of choice for consumers. Bundling of software with its operating system continues to expand, while on-premises solutions are eliminated, decreasing the control organisations have over their data. Microsofts’ influence on openAI has already resulted in a decrease in openness about AI research, coinciding with Microsoft firing its ethics team, increasing societal risks regarding artificial intelligence. While Nextcloud has responded to these developments, introducing a Microsoft SharePoint migration service to enable organisations to keep data on-premises, and introducing an Ethical AI solution with integration across its products, anti-competitive behavior limits access of customers to these services.

With even a well-known comedian like John Oliver addressing the challenges with big tech, there is growing awareness. But real action still has not been taken and the tech giants continue to push out the competition by all means available to them.

Dozens of European SMEs organisations support these efforts to push back against Big Tech and create a level playing field, supporting innovation and local (European) businesses. A full list of these companies as well as non-profits and industry consortia can be found on https://antitrust.nextcloud.com.

The post Nextcloud complaint precedes investigation into Microsoft market dominance by German antitrust authorities appeared first on Nextcloud.

Proprietary SaaS plaforms like Sharepoint and MS 365 have become major cash cows, and on-premises solutions get discontinued across the tech sector to force customers into vendor-locked clouds. Organizations dealing with critical or sensitive data respond by looking to maintain their strategic autonomy by deploying on premises solutions. In collaboration with a number of European government organizations, the market leader in the open source, on-premises collaboration space today announces the expansion of it’s offering to provide a full SharePoint replacement, complete with migration services. Showing the strong trend towards digital sovereignty, the announcement comes shortly after the highest EU Data Protection authority, the EDPS, announced they deploy and recommend Nextcloud.

We believe that development based on real world requirements and demand, rather than a strategy of forcing customers into a vendor lock-in, results in better products. Demand for an open, on-premises structured data platform as part of Nextcloud has been huge, and several customers have already signed up to deploy our technology.

Frank Karlitschek, CEO and founder of Nextcloud GmbH

The imminent end of SharePoint Server support has created a huge demand for solutions that offer similar functionality without compromising user control over data and meta data. The risks around data sovereignty and vendor lock-in is particularly pronounced for government agencies, many of which for reasons of autonomy, cost and compliance, tend to rely on on-premises tools for collaboration and document management.

A number of customers from the public sector has worked with Nextcloud to integrate a structured data management application into Nextcloud Hub. German state Schleswig-Holstein already announced their intention to replace SharePoint with Nextcloud in 2020 and since then several government organizations have already committed to the platform. Even more are providing feedback and information on their requirements with an eye to adopting Nextcloud as their on-premises SharePoint replacement.

Nextcloud’s initiative to offer a digitally sovereign, open-source alternative to Microsoft Sharepoint is to be welcomed. That’s why we work together with Nextcloud to optimize Nextcloud Tables.

Ralf Sutorius, Leitender IT-Architekt, Stadt Köln

Nextcloud Hub is well established as a collaboration platform, providing easy document collaboration and sharing for teams and work groups, as well as integrated knowledge management. The introduction of Tables rounds the platform out with management of structured data. It allows customers to build, manage and work with data structures, putting together easy ‘apps’ and connecting them to various other components in Nextcloud for automation.

Users will be able to create a table to track any other type of data that is relevant to their organization, such as expenses, projects or sales leads. The flexibility of Tables allows users to tailor the table to their specific needs.

The first release of Tables is available now on the Nextcloud app store.

The post EU Governments bet on Nextcloud to replace SharePoint appeared first on Nextcloud.

Il Garante europeo della protezione dei dati è un’organizzazione indipendente che ha il compito di monitorare e garantire che le istituzioni dell’UE rispettino il diritto alla privacy e alla protezione dei dati dei cittadini. Un anno fa, in una relazione sui sistemi di gestione delle informazioni personali, il EDPS aveva già citato Nextcloud come esempio di un’ottima soluzione per gestire in modo responsabile i dati personali e sensibili alla privacy.

Oggi siamo orgogliosi di dirle che il EDPS stesso ha implementato Nextcloud e, ancora di più, sta lavorando con il nostro partner TAS Cloud Services per renderlo disponibile a tutte le istituzioni dell’UE! Ciò significa che l’UE dispone ora di una piattaforma di collaborazione potente e completa, conforme alle leggi sulla protezione dei dati dell’UE e non solo approvata, ma utilizzata e offerta dal supervisore indipendente della protezione dei dati dell’UE. Citiamo lo stesso Garante europeo della protezione dei dati, Wojciech Wiewiórowski:

Il software open source offre alternative rispettose della protezione dei dati ai fornitori di servizi cloud su larga scala comunemente utilizzati, che spesso implicano il trasferimento dei dati personali delle persone in Paesi non appartenenti all’Unione Europea. Soluzioni come questa possono quindi ridurre al minimo la dipendenza da fornitori monopolisti e il dannoso vendor lock-in. Negoziando un contratto con un fornitore di servizi cloud con sede nell’UE, il EDPS sta rispettando i suoi impegni, come stabilito nella sua Strategia 2020-2024, per sostenere le IUE nel dare l’esempio di salvaguardia dei diritti digitali e di trattamento responsabile dei dati.”

Wojciech Wiewiórowski, EDPS

Come molti di voi sanno, molte organizzazioni governative dell’UE, come in Svezia, Francia e Germania, che si preoccupano della privacy e della sicurezza, raccomandano e impiegano Nextcloud da anni.. È fantastico vedere la più alta autorità di conformità alla privacy dell’UE guidare questo sforzo!

Il EDPS ha implementato Nextcloud per “condividere file, inviare messaggi, effettuare videochiamate e consentire la redazione collaborativa, in un ambiente cloud protetto“. (enfasi nella citazione originale). Per consentire l’adozione di Nextcloud nell’UE, il EDPS ha collaborato con noi di Nextcloud e con il nostro grande partner TAS Cloud Services per migliorare l’integrazione di Nextcloud con EU login, il servizio di autenticazione degli utenti della Commissione Europea. I servizi cloud di EDPS e TAS offriranno ad altre istituzioni, enti e agenzie dell’UE la stessa soluzione implementata presso il EDPS.

Ciò significa che qualsiasi istituto dell’UE, dalla Corte di Giustizia al Parlamento, può ora disporre di una piattaforma di comunicazione e collaborazione sicura, facile da usare e pienamente conforme. Non è più necessario rischiare la sovranità dei dati affidandosi a piattaforme cloud non UE!

Nextcloud offre il modo più semplice per ottenere il controllo e la sovranità digitale sui dati e sulle comunicazioni per le organizzazioni che trattano contenuti sensibili o business critical. Come piattaforma di collaborazione open source e on-premises, offre trasparenza e controllo che nessuna piattaforma SaaS non europea può offrire. Citando il comunicato stampa del EDPS:

Acquistando il Software Open Source da un’unica entità nell’UE, si evita l’uso di subprocessori. In questo modo, il EDPS evita i trasferimenti di dati verso Paesi non appartenenti all’UE e consente un controllo più efficace sul trattamento dei dati personali.

Le parti interessate possono contattare Nextcloud o il nostro partner TAS Cloud Services per implementare un proof of concept della piattaforma di collaborazione che il EDPS ha implementato.

The post Il supervisore della protezione dei dati dell’UE stabilisce lo standard per la protezione dei dati con Nextcloud appeared first on Nextcloud.

Based on feedback from users and customers, we focused our efforts on user interface, security and document compatibility. This new release delivers a familiar user interface, an updated Secure View feature and an innovative solution to document compatibility. In addition, we’ve added a series of updates to Collectives to give users and customers an integrated, easy to use alternative to cloud providers of wiki software. Let’s take a look at these improvements more in detail.

Secure View

When working with sensitive information there is sometimes a need to show somebody the contents of a document without them being able to download and share it further. With Secure View, you can share confidential documents with a public link in a access-online-only, no-download capacity, while it still allows recipients to collaboratively edit copy-protected documents (when edit rights are given). Due to its architecture where documents are rendered server-side, the document never leaves the Nextcloud server and to prevent data leaking through screenshots, Nextcloud Office can apply watermarks on documents when Secure View is used.

The use of public links means the current Secure View is designed for use with external collaboration partners. But in larger organisations there are cases where, internally, the need also arises to limit the distribution of documents. Departments might work on a need-to-know basis or have very sensitive documents that should not leak to the outside. To cover this use case, Secure View has been expanded to internal use, allowing users to limit the downloading of documents for other users, be it guests or normal accounts.

Document compatibility – solved.

Nextcloud Hub is a remote office where you can get work done. You can manage tasks and appointments, take notes, write documentation, chat, call & mail and of course edit office documents. These documents are stored in Files – a core component of Nextcloud Hub. While Nextcloud Office can handle an impressive array of file types and beats other online editors in the capabilities it supports , not all documents work perfectly. This can be because it requires local data sources, or uses an obscure, badly documented or proprietary file format. Or perhaps it is a Photoshop file or another specialised document Nextcloud simply has no editor for.

This release of Nextcloud Office introduces an innovative solution for this problem: Edit Locally. To use this, the user simply clicks the Edit Locally button while working on a document. Nextcloud Office then closes the editor for the user and all other users currently editing it. It then saves the file, locks it in Files , syncs it to the desktop of the user and opens it with the local editor. Once the file has been edited and saved and the editor is closed, the file is synced back and unlocked on the server so everybody can go back to editing.

The result is that, for those documents not 100% supported in Nextcloud Office, a local desktop editor is seamlessly integrated in the workflow of the user.

The feature is not limited to Nextcloud Office documents. Nextcloud Files offers access to Edit Locally from the file menu, enabling any document to be edited in a local editor. This is ideal for complex documents like Photoshop files, video editor materials and more. Note that the Edit Locally feature requires the Nextcloud Desktop Client. Today, 3.6.1 was released which fully supports this new feature.

Knowledge Management: Collectives

Collectives, a collaborative knowledge management database or “wiki,” is designed to allow organizations to store, search and share their documentation, processes and other internal knowledge.

It offers fine-grained access control and easy WYSIWYG, fully collaborative document editing, plus powerful external sharing and collaboration capabilities. It is built on Nextcloud Text, the versatile markdown-based note taking application in Nextcloud.

The release introduces several highly requested improvements today, like mentioning users, a table of contents and more. We created a nice screen cast which walks through the new features!

Here is an overview of the improvements:

• User mentions
• Table of contents
• Ability to link to headers between documents
• Improved markdown compatibility and frontmatter support
• Improved page management with drag and drop & custom sort orders
• Improved print and export options
• Support for inserting files in documents
• Support for widgets for links, providing rich previews
• Fulltext search using the Universal Search function in Nextcloud

I want the update!

The Nextcloud Office and Collectives releases are available here including the new features, Users can upgrade right away.

NOTE: the file automatic file locking will come with Desktop Client 3.7. Until then, manual locking is available in the client.

Let us know what you think!

The post Nextcloud Office release solves document compatibility, overhauls knowledge management appeared first on Nextcloud.

We decided to partner up so users who employ Zimbra can benefit from the fusion of the these productivity tools. We have a shared vision on data privacy, so you can rest assured your data stays private.

If you’ve never used Zimbra before, it’s basically a collaboration platform best known for their open source email suite.

New integration features

The Nextcloud and Zimbra integration features the following new capabilities:

• Display Zimbra emails and events on the Nextcloud Dashboard

Now you can have a quick overview of any unread emails and important upcoming events right on your Nextcloud dashboard widget to start your work day off right.

• Search your Zimbra emails within Nextclouds unified search

Can’t find the email you’re looking for but know a keyword? Take advantage of the search provider for emails.

• See and search for Zimbra contacts within Nextclouds contact search

Zimbra and Nextcloud contacts are now synced, so you can search for a contact quickly and easily.

• Create a Nextcloud Talk conversation directly from within a Zimbra Calendar invite

Collaborate even easier

Once you install Zimbra, you can benefit from the best of both collaboration solutions. To further highlight the opportunities of this integration, explore the possibilities below:

• Ensure full governance of all conversations using message audits, flexible retention policies, powerful engagement analytics and dashboards, and more
• Leverage more advanced user governance features, access levels, and role-based permissions
• Easily map even the most complex organizational structure into groups, teams, and discussions

Install today!

You can install the Zimbra integration immediately which is available now at the Nextcloud App Store.

We hope this integration increases productivity, syncs your workflow, and gives you the best of both worlds.

The post Zimbra and Nextcloud announce new integration features! appeared first on Nextcloud.

As most of our readers are likely aware, there has been a wave of recent decisions and Data Protection Office announcements from government agencies all over Europe about the legal challenges of hosting confidential data on especially US cloud services. Most recently the Procurement Chamber of the German state Baden-Württemberg decided US cloud services are not GDPR compliant, but they have been preceded by Dutch, Swedish and many other governments and data protection offices coming to that same conclusion.

This creates a significant need in federal and local government offices working with personal data from citizens for an independent, on-premises, trustworthy collaboration platform. An office solution that is GDPR compliant, open source, standards-compliant, easy to use, performant and decentralized is key for this.

Nextcloud Office Advisory Board

To achieve this, several European Government agencies joined with Nextcloud to deliver this solution and today we announce the formation of an Advisory board with members of the Swedish, German, Swiss and other European federal and local governments. The board aims to further the development of Nextcloud Office, already widely deployed in the Government sector, opening direct communication between the development team and users. The board is looking for new members to participate in the furtherance of European Digital Sovereignty.

Hundreds of municipal, state, federal and EU government organizations in Europe use Nextcloud to collaborate in a secure and compliant manner and deployments are accelerating. Nextcloud Office was launched in December 2021 in collaboration with the online office experts from Collabora. It introduced advanced compatibility with proprietary document formats and alongside the establishment of the Advisory Board, the Nextcloud Office team releases an update with a familiar tabbed menu interface.

Usability survey & document compatibility

To get wider feedback on how Office is used by people, the Nextcloud Usability team is launching a usability survey to investigate usage patterns in the public sector and establish key priorities for development. Users are encouraged to participate in the survey here.

Microsoft Office compatibility with documents is a key concern for our users. We work to made sure that Nextcloud Office has better compatibility with MS Office document formats than the various Microsoft products themselves do between platforms and over the years. Customers will have fewer cases where Nextcloud Office can not display elements of documents than they would encounter on MS 365, especially with legacy documents and file formats.

Nextcloud encourages users to participate in the usability study while we continue to look for public sector users of Nextcloud to participate in our Advisory Board.

The post European Governments work with Nextcloud to build Digitally Sovereign Office appeared first on Nextcloud.

Nextcloud Hub II is the world’s most deployed collaboration platform, used by tens of millions of private users, governments, and fortune 500 companies alike to regain data sovereignty and privacy. With Nextcloud, users can share, discuss, and collaborate on documents, track and coordinate work, or organize video calls.

As one of the Open Source community’s most active projects, Nextcloud Hub II v24 integrates improvements from several hundreds of contributors through over 4,000 commits in 1,300 code merges since our 23 release last December 2021.

We’d like to thank all those contributors and everybody else who’s helped make Nextcloud better, be it through code and app development, translations, or participating in our community forums.

Nextcloud Highlights

Since the Swedish Government marked Nextcloud as the key solution for digital collaboration, the Nextcloud user and customer base continues to grow quickly. We recently shared customer success stories with the City of Geneva, the local bank in Munich, 15K teachers in Luxembourg, over 35K middle school students and teachers in France and 750K students and researchers in Sweden.

Not only the Swedish government recognized our platform as leading, so did Capterra, together with the GetApp and Software Advice platforms by Gartner.

We are grateful to all our users and customers for their incredible support!

Digital Sovereignty and Decentralization

User migration

Our goal is to give you, as an individual or business, Digital Sovereignty, that is, to put YOU in control of your data. It is why we provide a special privacy screen and extensive personal privacy settings, why we don’t collect any user data, and of course why you can decide to host your Nextcloud wherever you want. With this release, we are introducing the next step: User migration.

Export and import

User migration allows you to export your data from Nextcloud into a single archive and import it into another Nextcloud instance! This includes user and profile settings and data from the Groupware and Files apps, like calendars, email settings, comments, favorites, and more. An API allows any app to add support for migration, enabling users to take all their data with them.

You are in control!

Where the big tech players like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook aim to lock you into their platforms, we want to give YOU control. Thanks to user migration, you can decide where to host your data – and change your mind! You can upgrade from your Raspberry Pi to a hosted solution, or bring your data back home again.

For businesses, this provides an important compliance benefit as more and more privacy regulations require that users are able to easily export their data from hosted services. For large enterprises, the migration feature enables us to provide a series of new, powerful features, information on which will be made available over the following months.

Nextcloud Files

Nextcloud Files has been polished and brings performance and scalability improvements in the back-end. More visible are:

• Enterprise search API. The new API allows content on Nextcloud to be indexed by a third-party search tool.
• Improved sharing permissions, allowing users to specify edit, delete, and upload permissions in shared folders.
• Share-by-mail with a password can be configured to not rely on a predefined password. Instead Nextcloud will use a temporary token to verify ownership of the email address associated with the share when the recipient visits the link. See more details about the feature in this github issue.

Faster is better

Many of these lower both the load on servers and increase the responsiveness for users, like the smarter handling of file system access that can reduce the database queries for a folder view by 75%. Another improvement is to allow admins to configure when maintenance background jobs are run, so they run at quiet times instead of during peak activity hours. And avatars are no longer generated in many different sizes but in only two, making caching easier and more efficient.

Nextcloud Groupware

In Nextcloud Groupware, much work was done on the user interface and regarding performance improvements.

The calendar app now shows an ‘accept/deny’ for invitations in the calendar item view so you can change your status right there in the web interface. The Mail app introduces two important features:

• Undo sending
• Scheduled sending

The Mail team is asking for user feedback for the Mail app, to help set priorities! If you want to participate, please use this form. The survey is done with Nextcloud Forms so no data is stored besides your input in the form.

Nextcloud Talk

Nextcloud Talk makes a big step forward, introducing a series of reliability and performance improvements as well as some nice, interactive features:

Reactions: now you can react to any message, with any emoji! See others’ reactions to messages.

A media tab: this enables you to quickly and easily search for and see all the media shared within your chat, perfect for when you know someone sent you that one image, but you’d have to scroll back ages to find it!

Much improved desktop integration: direct message reply in a notification and a screen to easily pick up a call

• Ability to select audio output on mobile apps.
• Ability to share system audio (like playing a video) during screen share. This feature is currently only supported by Chrome with ChromeTab or system sound, but we look forward to see other browsers support this feature!

Other improvements were made, like lowering the server load generated by calls with many participants, user interface polishing and more.

Community

We’re very grateful to all the contributors and private users who have helped make Nextcloud the most popular collaboration platform globally!

Before closing, we’d like to give you an opportunity to get involved and contribute to Nextcloud, too.

• We’ve put together a survey to learn more about our users. Please, take a few minutes to fill it in!
• You can get involved with making Nextcloud better or writing apps for our platform. Your work makes a difference!
• Join our community! Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Mastodon, and Linked-In, participate in the forums and read our newsletter!
• Nextcloud GmbH is hiring! We have over a dozen open job positions in marketing, sales, and engineering. Consider applying if your skills match one of our needs and join us in making the digital world a safer place!

Nextcloud has become a game-changer for the industry, offering a third way between staying away from the cloud or losing control over your data!

We hope you enjoy our latest release.

The post Nextcloud Hub 24 is here appeared first on Nextcloud.

A database is a critical component for a Nextcloud setup, key for performance, scalability and reliability. MariaDB offers customers the certainty that their database will not be a bottleneck for the productivity of their employees.

— Frank Karlitschek, CEO and founder of Nextcloud GmbH

Nextcloud is deployed at a large scale at some of its customers, servicing millions of users in a single cluster. This puts significant strain on the database, requiring not only scalability and performance but also high availability and robust failover.

MariaDB Enterprise is the complete open source database solution. It supports transactional, analytical and combination workloads as well as relational, JSON and hybrid data models. MariaDB Enterprise, which includes MariaDB MaxScale, can deploy standalone databases and data warehouses to fully distributed SQL, which executes millions of transactions per second and performs interactive, ad hoc analytics on billions of rows.

We’re excited to be partnering with Nextcloud to meet the ongoing needs from customers! Through our partnership, we’re making data readily available and even easier to access for applications and users with full security. With MariaDB Enterprise, Nextcloud customers are able to focus on growing their business without having to worry about the administrative overhead of infrastructure downtime, planned or unplanned.

— Jim Sears, VP Global Alliances, MariaDB

Nextcloud works closely with MariaDB to offer customers access to the best possible expertise. Customers can reach out to representatives from either company for more information.

About MariaDB

MariaDB frees companies from the costs, cloud lock-in, constraints, and complexity of proprietary databases, enabling them to reinvest in what matters most – rapidly developing innovative, customer-facing applications. MariaDB uses pluggable, purpose-built storage engines to support workloads that previously required a variety of specialized databases. With complexity and constraints eliminated, enterprises can now depend on a single complete database for their needs, whether on commodity hardware or their cloud of choice. Deployed in minutes for transactional, analytical, or hybrid use cases, MariaDB delivers unmatched operational agility without sacrificing key enterprise features, including real ACID compliance and full SQL. Trusted by organizations such as Bandwidth, DigiCert, InfoArmor, Oppenheimer, Samsung, SelectQuote, SpendHQ – MariaDB meets the same core requirements as proprietary databases at a fraction of the cost. No wonder it’s one of the fastest-growing database management systems companies. Real business relies on MariaDB

Read the full press release here.

The post Nextcloud and MariaDB collaborate to boost scalability and high availability for customers appeared first on Nextcloud.

Today, we want to take another step in that direction. We are introducing 3 improvements that are aimed straight at advancing our mission: a Nextcloud All-in-one Docker image, a peer-to-peer Backup app, and an updated version of our Solid integration. Let’s break that down!

Background

Our move come as the demand for digitally sovereign, privacy-respecting solutions is skyrocketing. Over 70% of computer users are searching to increase their online privacy and enterprises consider data privacy and confidentiality their most important concern only behind data loss. Besides a significant uptake of Nextcloud in business and government, these concerns have also resulted in the deployment of hundreds of thousands of privately operated Nextcloud servers from small and medium businesses and individuals.

There is however a significant barrier, as running a small server takes skills and users rightly worry about potential data loss when a server experiences problems. Lowering this barrier with easy cloud deployments and peer-to-peer backup will enable orders of magnitude more small and medium businesses to escape the clutches of Big Tech and regain control over their data.

Nextcloud All-in-one

The All-in-one Docker image adds an option to the existing hosting solutions which already serve millions of Nextcloud users, giving users more control over their private cloud in exchange for a small amount of maintenance. It automates configuration of web servers, databases and other underlying technology while offering the entire range of Nextcloud Hub II functionality out of the box. This includes the high-performance back-ends for Files and Talk. It provides an easy administrator interface from where individual services, ran as separate containers, can be managed.

Key features:

• Nextcloud Hub including Nextcloud files, Nextcloud Talk, Nextcloud Groupware and Nextcloud Office
• High performance backend for Nextcloud Files
• High performance backend for Nextcloud Talk
• Redis caching server
• Admin console for maintenance
• Easy, semi-automated upgrades
• Built in backup based on BorgBackup

See the admin console in the screenshot below.

Get the new All-in-one Docker image

Note that the All-in-one Docker container does NOT aim to replace the existing Docker container. The existing, official Nextcloud container is far more flexible and designed for power users. The All-in-one is optimized for quick and basic, smaller-scale deployments in clouds like AWS or Gaia-X. The community maintaining the official Nextcloud Container is doing a fantastic job and we expect them to continue doing so!

Nextcloud Backup

The peer-to-peer backup solution Nextcloud Backup is designed to help private users store a backup of their Nextcloud instance on another Nextcloud server operated by a friend or family member. Backups are compressed and encrypted and users can restore either individual files or their entire instance using an encryption key ideally stored off-site. Alternatively, the Backup app can store its data snapshots on any supported External Storage in Nextcloud like (s)FTP, SMB, SharePoint, WebDAV or S3 object storage.

App settings

App settings (continued)

Getting recovery key from app settings

The app can:

• Store backups on another Nextcloud server. The other server can but doesn’t have to have the Backup app installed
• Store backups on external storage, like FTP, SMB, WebDAV or any other Nextcloud-supported protocol. You can also store them on a local drive, like an USB drive attached to your server!
• Do manual and/or automatic, scheduled backups in time slots you can configure
• Store the entire Nextcloud installation, including configuration, apps and their data. Note: non-local data, including external storage, is NOT backed-up. Maybe a feature for the future!
• Do differential or full backups in the background (short maintenance mode needed)
• Do optional (but recommended and enabled by default) compression and encryption
• Export encryption key and other configuration information to a file or clipboard for safe-keeping
• Give notifications in the Activities app about backup activity
• Exclude folders from backup if you add a .nobackup file in the folder.
• Be controlled by the command line to search for and restore single files, initiate full restore, or list and create backups

Learn more in our earlier blog about the beta of the Backup app.

Solid

Together with the availability of new, easy deployment and backup solutions for Nextcloud Hub II, Nextcloud partners at PDS Interop have readied an update for the Solid server integration for Nextcloud aimed at wider deployment of this technology. The Solid project, conceived by WWW-founder Sir Tim Berners-Lee, is a new web standard for decentralized storage of data in so-called Pods. Nextcloud can act as a storage Pod, giving users the ability to connect to other apps in the developing Solid ecosystem.

The idea of Solid is that users’ data resides in one or more Solid pods, and (web) applications ask users access to these pods to be able to read and write data, rather than provide their own data store. As the Pods are under control of the user, so is any data they store. Learn more about Solid here.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee recognized the impact the large ecosystem of Nextcloud servers and users can represent for Solid and decentralization of the web.

It could be that the way Solid takes off is that it starts off with all the Nextcloud users just becoming Solid users.

— Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Solid Director, at Solid World April

Availability

Nextcloud’s All-in-one cloud image, Nextcloud Backup and the Solid Pod app are all available right now with the release of Nextcloud Hub II.

The post Decentralize the cloud with fast deployment and easy backup appeared first on Nextcloud.