OwnCloud
Trusting ‘the cloud’ with personal information doesn’t sit well with me either.
Impacts to privacy and the all-too-frequent reports of breaches [1][2][3]… with cloud services speak to exercising caution rather than embracing a big, (mostly) corporate target. In light of these and many other breaches and the likelihood of them not going away anytime soon, it feels compelling to want to solve the problem a different way.
For me, it started with simply needing to share calendar data. With two kids and two parents, it became evident that having a shared calendar would make everyone’s life a bit more auto-magical.
OwnCloud
ownCloud gives you universal access to your files through a web interface or WebDAV. It also provides a platform to easily view & sync your contacts, calendars and bookmarks across all your devices and enables basic editing right on the web. — ‘Marketing Blather‘
I’ve been using it for about a year now and would find it hard to say anything critical about it. They have a desktop clients for windows, linux and mac, mobile apps and the most importantly, a server instance. Development has been steady and the new features they release along the way have never been a disappointment.
I now also use it to as a ‘dropbox’ replacement for sharing files with other people and with myself between devices (work/home/mobile). I share photos with family members and have my contacts data synced between devices. I like that I benefit from the value of a cloud service (syncing data) and that it is delivered in a quality, open source product without sacrificing features or privacy.