Hello, dear forum,
I out myself right at the beginning as an “interested noob”.
I would like to have a cloud alternative for me and my family via Nextcloud and am considering whether or not to host it myself. In doing so, I have read about NextBox as it is supposed to be very easy to use.
But here I still have a few questions and hope that you can help me here. (English is not my native language…)
plug in and go: More than install apps and create users is not to do. Updates etc. come from Nitrokey. Correct or is there more maintenance involved?
if I manage to connect the NextBox to the Internet: Can I set that it can only be accessed via VPN or is it better to set a password per user and a 2FA e.g. with a stick?
external storage should have its own power supply. So does not work a USB stick for backup?
all in all, so is it really as good to use for beginners as I hope?
Thanks in advance and I hope you do not laugh at my simple questions.
1- no more maintenance involved : true. You may still wish to add extra functions to the Nextcloud app, but this is internal to the self-hosted nextcloud machine and you choose, or not, to install these add-ons
2- VPN on your intranet is only requested if you want to access the box terminal, which is not required to run the machine. Otherwise what is preset is the standard nextcloud user login process, which you may or may not set to 2FA (default is no) : there are add-ons in Nextcloud that’ll allow requesting tokens, etc.
3- the reason for ext. storage separate P supply is the fact the underlying Blackberry board cannot offer enough power through USB for most large disks. I suppose if you intend to use a basic stick, no supply would do. There is a more elaborate explanation somewhere around here in the nextbox help docs.
4- That probably depends on what you call a beginner. I for one consider that IF you succeed in installing it, then ordinary use is just the same as using a standard Nextcloud server somewhere else. Try it, e. g. at Nextcloud which offer some minimal demo hostings IIRC.
If you are fine with Nextclouds, you’ll be fine with a Nextbox.
On the other hand, do read the Nextbox install instructions (how to create a redirection through dedyn.io, etc.), because you’ll definitely have to do this (once).
