While almost everybody is moving mindlessly into the cloud, I try to move out of it more and more and store a lot of my stuff locally (some of it are not even synced). I’m very conservative about my privacy lately. Although I use iCloud when I can, for 3rd-party syncing services, I prefer the ones where I can host them on my own server. I still use some services which store my data on their own servers (like YNAB), but I’m trying to get rid of them quickly.

One week ago I started running my own WebDAV server for OmniFocus and DEVONthink. There is an easy-to-follow tutorial from Bytemark that explains how to set up a couple of Docker containers with an automatic reverse proxy and SSL renewal service using Traefik.

I bought a cheap $5 server on Digital Ocean which is located in Frankfurt, that’s way closer to me (I live in Hungary) than OmniGroup’s sync service which is located in the US, I assume in Seattle.

When I switched to OmniFocus from Things, one thing I missed from Things was the instant and invisible syncing that they offer. Cultured Code really nailed that one: you can change anything in your Things database and it instantly shows up on your other devices, even in the background. OmniFocus’s sync was always slower for me, but shortening the distance between the server and the client looks like boosts the performance in a very big way. Using my own sync server located in the EU, I’m getting almost the same speed in OmniFocus as Things has. The good thing is that my data is now hosted on my own server.

DEVONthink also getting some speed increase compared to iCloud, but it’s not that big of a difference as with OmniFocus.