It’s definitely worth thinking about your use case and whether a second hand mini-pc of some sort is a better option. Along with the Pi itself many people are probably going to need a new case and quite possibly a power adapter too given the new power profile. An older PC where that’s taken care off, and where you probably have a 120GB SSD included, could be the better option for some people.

I’m struggling to find where I heard about this, but if you post to Twitter (or I guess it’s X now) and tag @Sync, they should get back in touch with you and offer you a bonus 10GB for the positive outreach.

Since I don’t know about where I heard about the offer originally, the next best thing might be my post which Sync responded to as evidence of the bonus. Along with one or two other bonuses which one may have been a referral, I’m at 17GB on the free account which is pretty decent, and certainly not as burdensome as the referral process one has to go through with Dropbox to grow the free tier there.

They’re a great service from the time I’ve spent with it and worth a go.

I think the key question is to ask what about Googles solution is driving them to look elsewhere. Once that’s known it’s possible to work out if NextCloud deployed in house or via a partner is the right way forward, or if another cloud offering might be more suitable.

If those were my requirements then I’d be looking at Synology.

Currently using a Windows PC with Stablebit Drive Pool to pool about 10HDDs into one consolidated pool. Nice way to get a stack of storage and to repurpose an old PC I already had, but for a low effort option Synology would be my pick based on all the reports I’ve heard about it being a top notch option. My PC is fine but when things break you need to be able to troubleshoot a Windows setup, which is fine but maybe not for “mum and dad”.

Just pick a NAS from them that does what you need. Whenever I look at them it seems to be about determine how many drives you need and whether you want a high performance one (to run Plex servers and the like) or a low spec one that just does storage and some less intensive stuff.

A number of people have touched on the perimeter security, but you can also look at your internal network too and whether you have the systems being exposed on vlans with firewalls preventing connectivity from those systems back to your other stuff that doesn’t need to be exposed. Could help cover you if a system is compromised due to bad config, zero day exploit, or whatever, by limiting the ability to then go sideways through your network to exploit other systems. Depending on what you are hosting there may be zero requirement for your externally facing server to need to talk to the majority of devices on your network, or the talk could be one way only (internal facing to external facing).