by Karunamon on 3/26/13, 1:43 PM
This seems mighty kneejerk-y. A duplicaton issue causes your contacts to disappear, therefore you should move your contacts and calendar away from a service that probably has better engineers, better backup, better redundancy, and better uptime than any one of us could possibly muster, and onto a somewhat immature product with worse functionality and integration which is by no means immune to the same kind of problem?
Yeah.. see, I don't think the author has thought their cunning plan all the way through.
I understand the anti-google sentiment is at an all time high after the Reader shutdown fiasco, but let's stay rational, here!
by mhw on 3/26/13, 1:18 PM
So the actual article title is 'Moving your contacts and calendar away from Google', not 'Move your contacts and calendar away from Google' as it was posted here. Less of an instruction/warning than might be expected, and more of a how-to guide.
by lucb1e on 3/26/13, 12:26 PM
by UnoriginalGuy on 3/26/13, 12:54 PM
I like ownCloud but it is very immature.
I mean it looks very snazzy right when you first install it and start to use it, but has a lot of little issues hidden under the surface.
Couple of examples: Randomly deleting files because it got confused. Infinite loops. Essentially unusable on Windows servers (don't even try). etc.
As I said, I like OwnCloud, and I think it has a very bright future ahead of it. But it isn't "there" yet. I'd never use it in an enterprise in its current state.
by kailuowang on 3/26/13, 11:27 AM
In software development term, this is probably an over engineering. Spend all the effort to setup your own data cloud before it becomes a fact that you really need it, that is, Google decides to change their cloud service so that it's no longer usable to you. Of course you could argue that what if one day Google simply disable the data exporting feature without any notice, in that case you would have no time to migrate. I think that risk is low enough for me to live with.
by antihero on 3/26/13, 11:39 AM
Is there something like ownCloud that uses Python/PostgreSQL? I don't really want to pollute my server with MySQL/PHP.
by ses on 3/26/13, 12:16 PM
One of the problems with using a self-hosted alternative like this is the fact that Google open up a lot of their services through APIs which other applications then consume. A web app I wrote a couple of years ago is one example (meetingShed). This easy integration with other apps opens up a lot of possibilities, but is there an alternative with ownCloud? It would be really interesting to see if a solution could be developed to expose self-hosted services (dynamically located) through a publicly accessible API (statically located).
by jvdh on 3/26/13, 3:27 PM
"Click “Advanced” and select your database options. A MySQL DB will be way faster than a SQLite DB."
Do you really think you can really notice the microsecond that MySQL will be faster than SQLite? We are talking about a database that is going to host what, maybe 5 megabytes worth of data?
We are talking about calendars and contacts here, this is not stuff that you will sync every second, and will not contain large amounts of records.
Hosting this stuff in an SQLite database makes things like backup and security a whole lot easier. You don't really need a complicated database server just to store your phone numbers...
by rdl on 3/26/13, 1:48 PM
While it's patent/licensing encumbered, I still prefer ActiveSync based solutions, just because they do good push for iOS/Android, are easy to manage, give you "free" lightweight MDM functionality, etc.
There are a few open source ActiveSync tools (which may be in violation of Microsoft IP), but I just use a commercial one (for work). Still thinking of screwing with the free ones for a personal server vs. strictly IMAP.
by modernerd on 3/26/13, 1:28 PM
I moved to
http://www.atmailcloud.com and have been really pleased with it.
It's $2 per account, you can host multiple domains under one control panel, it has email, contacts, and a calendar under one roof, and offers iPhone/iPad provisioning as well. You can also create subadmin accounts if you want to delegate responsibility for a certain domain to someone else.
by EvanAnderson on 3/26/13, 4:15 PM
I've self-hosted my calendar using DAViCal (
http://www.davical.org/) since I got my first iPod Touch. My wife and I use it to host shared calendars that we access from our phones. I run it on a cheap box I own but it would be just as easy to host it on an inexpensive VPS. Backup is a Postgres dump taken daily stored locally on the server and rsync'd to two other machines in separate physical locations. It took a couple hours to set up but has been trouble and attention-free for years.
by uslic001 on 3/26/13, 12:39 PM
Any similar setup that uses IOS phone instead of Android out there? I am tired of contacts going missing from IOS and Google or 4 copies of all my contacts showing up in both IOS and Gmail. I lost all my contacts in IOS when I upgraded to the iPhone 5. Then I had a bunch of contacts that I did not want in my contacts populate my IOS contacts when I linked my Facebook account on my IPhone 5. It is even worse on my Windows 8 notebook as I have 5-6 duplicate contacts for each single contact as it imports from IOS, Outlook, and Gmail.
by mfer on 3/26/13, 11:44 AM
Loosing contacts can happen. Just this past week my father-in-laws contact info disappeared from Google contacts. This isn't the first time this has happened to me either.
by nonpme on 3/26/13, 12:29 PM
Thanks for the article! I didn't hear about ownCloud (or similar projects) before, I'm already reading manual (
http://doc.owncloud.org/server/5.0/admin_manual/) and will be installing ownCloud on my VPS today. I had doubts about giving Google (or any other company) so much of my data (not only emails, but schedule, contacts etc.) - now I found a great solution. I love HN.
by sn on 3/26/13, 5:52 PM
What you're looking for is syncml:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SyncML the wikipedia page lists various clients and servers. On Linux (well, ubuntu at least) sync-ui will sync evolution with a syncml server. After a lot of searching for solutions to use with my n900 I chose memotoo as a provider. There is an preconfigured syncml android client for memotoo.
by mark_l_watson on 3/26/13, 12:51 PM
Nice idea. I have just gone through the minor hassle of switching my blog off of Blogger and relegating Gmail to my backup/secondary email service - all in the spirit of controlling my own stuff. I only calendar share with my wife, so setting up something like this is probably something I will do also.
Any JVM based open source projects? I would rather not deal with PHP.
by jimktrains2 on 3/26/13, 2:10 PM
The only thing really stopping me from migrating to my own platform is email. I've had many terrible experiences and heard many horror stories about running mail servers, I just don't want to deal with it.
Suggestions welcome.
by __abc on 3/26/13, 4:11 PM
If Google just made us pay for this service (individually without having to create a Google Apps account) all our feers
might go away.
Why are business SO reluctant for a standards "pay for what you get" business model?
by pjmlp on 3/26/13, 12:05 PM
Nice article. People should realize it is not a good idea to leave data in the hands of third parties with commercial interests.
On the other hand, I see only technical people being able to escape such data traps.
by luanfernandes on 3/26/13, 11:53 AM
What can we do for translated versions? I'm not a dev but my father uses google calendar a lot because it's easy and intuitive but he knows nothing about english...
by bernardom on 3/26/13, 3:55 PM
Calendar is a bit harder, but storing contacts seems like an eminently solvable problem.
Especially if you require dropbox.
What am I missing? Phone support?
by gregorynicholas on 3/26/13, 3:49 PM
this post is the worst.. A) never really had contacts "disappear", although i definitely encounter conflicts with weird results (kind of expected).
B) use a shared host (justhost.com. lol) and php over google's infrastructure? fat chance this guy is competent enough to know what the fuck he's in for down the road..
by mariuolo on 3/27/13, 5:49 AM
Personally I use the free version of Zarafa for that.
In any case I know who to blame if things go south.
by BerislavLopac on 3/26/13, 11:13 AM
Remember Kiko?
by wodow on 3/26/13, 12:59 PM
by twodayslate on 3/26/13, 12:57 PM
Site is down.
will this solution sync with my iPhone?
by iamtherockstar on 3/26/13, 2:54 PM
Android gained popularity because it was tied to Calendar and Gmail. These two services were pretty pervasive already, and so became the default in Android. When that happened, those two services became crucial to Android.
The fear that Contacts and Calendar will go away like Reader did (or, rather, will) is irrational. Reader barely had a mobile client version of it. With Google reigning in the branding on Android and requiring that it be tied even tighter to Google services, Gmail and Calendar became a dependency of Google's mobile OS.