@girish Generally I prefer frequent, smaller releases because big releases are more likely to contain bugs.

Slow and steady progress is less exciting, but it's usually more sustainable.

@marcusquinn I created a ticket on Hetzner a couple of hours ago with the following information....

Hetzner now offering some useful pre-built "Apps" for server instances.
https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/5544/hetzner-now-offering-some-useful-pre-built-apps-for-server-instances

Cloudron.io is “the bees knees” https://www.ecenglish.com/learnenglish/lessons/idiom-day-the-bees-knees#:~:text=When you refer to something,are a number of theories.

DigitalOcean and Vultr offer one-click install https://www.cloudron.io/get.html. Why not Hetzner?

@marcusquinn Trying to persuade engineers (and artists) to focus less on engineering (and art) and more on marketing is a constant struggle for me. Engineers and artists invariably create stuff they like yet tend to overlook the actual needs of the customers whom their creations purportedly serve.

Put simply: Hetzner's VPSes are relatively cheap yet (apparently) good. Ensuring one-click Cloudron exists on Hetzner VPS is a "non-trivial" marketing issue, although it is an irrelevant engineering issue.

TL;DR Once a day, can my laptop running several Cloudron applications connect to my Hetzner VPS (running the same Cloudron applications) so that the Cloudron applications on my laptop will display the same data as the Cloudron applications on my Hetzner VPS?

I want to easily be able to verify I actually have working backups. In other words, I don’t want to find myself in the unenviable position of having my server go down, only to find out that I didn’t have working backups.

Because I have an old laptop computer sitting around gathering dust I wondered if there’s an easy way to do the following…

1. Install several Cloudron applications on my Hetzner VPS.
2. Install those same Cloudron applications on my dusty old laptop.
3. Once a day, have my laptop connect to my Hetzner VPS, transfer the relevant data, and then, using some DevOps magic (or perhaps even a simple bash script), update itself so that at that instant, my Hetzner VPS and my laptop would have the same data for the Cloudron applications indicated above.
4. Then I would like to login to my Hetzner VPS, so that I could find some data, used by one of the Cloudron applications I had installed, that had changed within the last 24 hours.
5. Then I would like to login to my laptop (from within my home network), so that I could verify that my laptop had the same data mentioned in the previous step.

For example, let’s say I had been using Nextcloud on Tuesday morning. Let’s say that Tuesday night I was to say to myself, “Let me see if document XYZ which I created earlier today on my Nextcloud running on my Hetzner VPS is on my Nextcloud running on my laptop.”

If I were to find document XYZ on my laptop and successfully open document XYZ on my laptop, then I would be confident that my data on my laptop used by Nextcloud was up-to-date. However, if I failed to find document XYZ on my laptop, then I would be concerned that my data on my laptop used by Nextcloud was not up-to-date.

Finally, for three Cloudron applications or more, I presume the above scenario would require me to have two premium Cloudron accounts: one for my Hetzner VPS and one for my laptop.

@fbartels said in How can I easily verify I actually have working backups?:

Hi @yeku,
yes there are ways to verify your backups, but no not in the way you are describing.
This is described at https://docs.cloudron.io/backups/#dry-run
Basically:

you install a machine for your cloudron (could be a virtual machine, maybe you even always just return to a certain snapshots of the VM itself)
you click through the wizard and perform a restore from within cloudron
you verify the restored data
you thrown your machine away and restart the process

Something like a cold standby that you can just update with the latest data is not possible.

Thank you very much. That sounds like it would work very well for me.

I urge you to consider creating a screencast of the process, uploading it to YouTube (or another streaming provider), and then linking to that video from somewhere like Cloudron Docs -> Guides -> Verify your backups.

I imagine the link might be....

https://docs.cloudron.io/guides/verify-your-backups-can-be-restored

From a marketing perspective, it's crucial to explain to Cloudron users and prospective Cloudron users that they can quickly and easily verify/restore their backups. It will give them peace of mind.

@marcusquinn I agree. For many users Penpot seems like an excellent alternative to Figma, particularly because Adobe purchased Figma back in September 2022.

I suggest you pay a freelancer on Fiverr.com to proofread https://docs.cloudron.io/ because they are riddled with egregious spelling and grammar errors. For example...

dis no look vry proofesional.

Does it?

Pro tip: Spellcheckers are a thing. Use them when creating verbiage that will be customer-facing!

whn u chats wiz ur frends, speling annd gramar nott soo importunt.

But if you want people to pay you $180 per year to use Cloudron, well, ummm, yeah... break out that spiffy little spellchecker you've got gathering dust in your closet (/sarcasm) and pay a native speaker to proofread your text.

@scooke Oh. I see. That makes sense.

@girish Thanks for letting me know. I appreciate that. After glancing at https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/4423/what-s-coming-in-cloudron-7-0 I became queasy (nauseous). I am being serious. I am neither an engineer, nor do I like engineering. But I've done enough basic system administration (and played a little with Ansible and Terraform) to understand the web of complexity you guys will need to overcome to turn cloudron into a viable company.

The belief that "DevOps will make things easier" is true... for end users like me. But for engineers like you, the reverse is true. Sys admins needed to do a lot of repetitive (grunt) work. But nowadays DevOps has essentially transformed system administration into a form of software development which, I suppose, you probably find interesting.

Without engineers the rest of us would be living in trees and caves. Keep up the good work!

@marcusquinn Yeah. I was in a fraternity when I was in college. It was like the movie Animal House... but worse. Looking back on it I'm embarrassed by what I did. But it was fun at the time. College itself was a big waste of time for me.

@fbartels Oh sorry about that. Thanks for clarifying that.

@girish Generally I prefer frequent, smaller releases because big releases are more likely to contain bugs.

Slow and steady progress is less exciting, but it's usually more sustainable.

@girish Getting started with OpenProject is an example of the type of screencast I urge you to create.

If you guys are too busy, you could probably get a very good screencast made for ≈25 US dollars on a site such as Fiverr.com. In such a case you might send a message such as the following to Fiverr sellers (Fiverr "freelancers") whom you had identified as good prospects...

"Here's an example of the type of screencast we want. Getting started with OpenProject. We intend to upload it to YouTube. We intend to link to it from Cloudron Docs -> Guides -> Verify your backups https://docs.cloudron.io/guides/verify-your-backups-can-be-restored."

Of course you would first need to create https://docs.cloudron.io/guides/verify-your-backups-can-be-restored so that the Fiverr sellers you contact can clearly understand what you need them to do.

@fbartels said in How can I easily verify I actually have working backups?:

Hi @yeku,
yes there are ways to verify your backups, but no not in the way you are describing.
This is described at https://docs.cloudron.io/backups/#dry-run
Basically:

you install a machine for your cloudron (could be a virtual machine, maybe you even always just return to a certain snapshots of the VM itself)
you click through the wizard and perform a restore from within cloudron
you verify the restored data
you thrown your machine away and restart the process

Something like a cold standby that you can just update with the latest data is not possible.

Thank you very much. That sounds like it would work very well for me.

I urge you to consider creating a screencast of the process, uploading it to YouTube (or another streaming provider), and then linking to that video from somewhere like Cloudron Docs -> Guides -> Verify your backups.

I imagine the link might be....

https://docs.cloudron.io/guides/verify-your-backups-can-be-restored

From a marketing perspective, it's crucial to explain to Cloudron users and prospective Cloudron users that they can quickly and easily verify/restore their backups. It will give them peace of mind.

@scooke Oh. I see. That makes sense.

@LoudLemur said in AI on Cloudron:

eople will not long from now be running Free Software, federated, self-hosted

I predict that eventually at least hundreds of millions of people will run FOSS/FLOSS. But there will still be proprietary software too.

@LoudLemur AI seems immaterial to a service such as Cloudron which essentially packages up FOSS/FLOSS applications so that users can easily install them.

Just as an aside, ChatGPT is proprietary. Microsoft will almost certainly use to ChatGPT to take some of Google Search's market share. Much like Windows OS, Microsoft will probably carefully guard the source code for ChatGPT.

@scooke I see. I read that CapRover hasn't been updated much lately. Are you looking to move away from CapRover because it hasn't been updated much lately?

TL;DR Once a day, can my laptop running several Cloudron applications connect to my Hetzner VPS (running the same Cloudron applications) so that the Cloudron applications on my laptop will display the same data as the Cloudron applications on my Hetzner VPS?

I want to easily be able to verify I actually have working backups. In other words, I don’t want to find myself in the unenviable position of having my server go down, only to find out that I didn’t have working backups.

Because I have an old laptop computer sitting around gathering dust I wondered if there’s an easy way to do the following…

1. Install several Cloudron applications on my Hetzner VPS.
2. Install those same Cloudron applications on my dusty old laptop.
3. Once a day, have my laptop connect to my Hetzner VPS, transfer the relevant data, and then, using some DevOps magic (or perhaps even a simple bash script), update itself so that at that instant, my Hetzner VPS and my laptop would have the same data for the Cloudron applications indicated above.
4. Then I would like to login to my Hetzner VPS, so that I could find some data, used by one of the Cloudron applications I had installed, that had changed within the last 24 hours.
5. Then I would like to login to my laptop (from within my home network), so that I could verify that my laptop had the same data mentioned in the previous step.

For example, let’s say I had been using Nextcloud on Tuesday morning. Let’s say that Tuesday night I was to say to myself, “Let me see if document XYZ which I created earlier today on my Nextcloud running on my Hetzner VPS is on my Nextcloud running on my laptop.”

If I were to find document XYZ on my laptop and successfully open document XYZ on my laptop, then I would be confident that my data on my laptop used by Nextcloud was up-to-date. However, if I failed to find document XYZ on my laptop, then I would be concerned that my data on my laptop used by Nextcloud was not up-to-date.

Finally, for three Cloudron applications or more, I presume the above scenario would require me to have two premium Cloudron accounts: one for my Hetzner VPS and one for my laptop.

@girish said in Hetzner now offering some useful pre-built "Apps" for server instances.:

know who to contact in hetzner for this?

No, I'm sorry but I do not know whom to contact in Hetzner regarding this matter.