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Moving your Contacts and Calendar Away from Google
- BerislavLopac 14y agoRemember Kiko?
- mcherm 14y agoNo.
- polymatter 14y agoWere they a startup that was killed the moment Google calendar started?
- mattsouth 14y agohttp://areallybadidea.com/selling-kiko http://areallybadidea.com/selling-kiko
- kailuowang 14y agoIn 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.
- mhaymo 14y agoGoogle's service is already problematic in that it compromises my privacy and the privacy of my contacts. I'd rather not share my schedule with Google, and I feel uncomfortable putting additional information in my contacts knowing that it will be synced to them. I've certainly never been given permission by my friends to share their home address with Google or any other company.
- blablabla123 14y agoBack in the days, when I switched phones I migrated my contacts manually... P.S.: This way you also throw out outdated/invalid contacts...
- antihero 14y agoIs there something like ownCloud that uses Python/PostgreSQL? I don't really want to pollute my server with MySQL/PHP.
- 616c 14y agoHave not had time to get it running on a VPS (the main reason I bought it), but it is worth a shot. Not veteran, but looks very cool. http://radicale.org/ http://radicale.org/
- rlpb 14y agoI use radicale on my VPS together with CalDAV-Sync on Android and Thunderbird/Lightning on my desktop. Works really well. Lightweight and simple. This syncs my calendar. I intend to do contacts the same way with CardDAV-Sync when I get round to it.
- diroussel 14y agoYou could try Apple's own Calendar Server, http://trac.calendarserver.org/ http://trac.calendarserver.org/, it's written in python and is open source.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- jimktrains2 14y agoThis type of mentality is poisonous. You're not "polluting" your server. It doesn't add anything to the discussion; all it does is troll and set up flame-wars. There are other good reasons to want something written in your own pet language (e.g. "I want to modify it". "I don't want to learn how to admin MySQL", even), but just claiming "pollution" isn't a good one IMO.
- jfb 14y ago"I don't want sloppy, badly implemented software on a VPS I administer."
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- mfer 14y agoLoosing 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.
- lucb1e 14y agoWtf, I've never had this happen. I would instantly stop using any service where this happened (especially where it's not possible to decently contact support).
- mikeratcliffe 14y agoI can happen if you have a large amount of contacts. I had 500 before this happened to me the first time.
- juskrey 14y agoIt also happened to me dozen of times, and it was nothing to do with google. Just plain random touchscreen messing in the jeans pocket.
- buro9 14y agoThe system definitely needs tightening up.
- luanfernandes 14y agoWhat 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...
- coldtea 14y agoIt's not like he has to lean much english. New appointment, alarm, the days of the week, etc.
- Sunlis 14y agoYou would have to learn quite a bit. Pick a language that you know almost nothing about, preferably one whose alphabet you can't recognize without looking it up. Now use a website built in that language. Is this potentially an exaggeration? Yes. Is it still relevant? Yes.
- mikeratcliffe 14y agoActually, you can contribute to ownCloud translations at: https://www.transifex.com/projects/p/owncloud/ https://www.transifex.com/projects/p/owncloud/
- luanfernandes 14y agoThanks for that! I see it's almost 100% for pt-BR! awesome :) I'll definetly try it soon
- pjmlp 14y agoNice 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.
- ses 14y agoOne 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).
- RyanZAG 14y agoThe solution is trivial - just have some json in a specific format. The problem is getting everyone to agree on a standard and to get big players like Google, MS, Yahoo to use the standard. To be honest though, there doesn't really seem to be much effort to even try - maybe someone famous will step forward and get the ball rolling?
- micampe 14y agoCan't read the article right now, but for contacts and calendars we have standard public APIs: CardDAV and CalDAV. Too bad Google just discontinued the latter, weirdly enough just a few months after finally supporting the former.
- pyre 14y agoUnless something has changed recently, there isn't much information about Google's CardDAV implementation. I had to find a reference on a mailing list for a CardDAV implementation to even figure out what Google's URL structure looked like. I couldn't figure out a way to list all contact lists. You had to know the name of the list and use it in the URL. Even at that, you can only access contacts in "My Contacts" or other groups. There's (seemingly) no way to access "All Contacts". CardDAV is 'supported,' but not very well. It's definitely a second-class citizen.
- nachteilig 14y agoBut I think this is exactly the point, no? Google has an API now, but who knows if it'll be there tomorrow. Google does not have a great track record at this point.
- lucb1e 14y agoNice URL and "Error establishing a database connection". I smell Wordpress. Here's a cached version: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.flailingmonkey.com%2F2013%2F03%2F26%2Fmoving-contacts-calendar-google%2F&oq=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.flailingmonkey.com%2F2013%2F03%2F26%2Fmoving-contacts-calendar-google%2F&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp...
- Yuioup 14y agoCached by Google, no less.
- lucb1e 14y agoArchive.org has a few months delay at minimum.
- Sunlis 14y agoNot bad for an "advertising company".
- mikeratcliffe 14y agoGoogle cache is a great service, like I said, I am not anti-google.
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- nonpme 14y agoThanks 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/ 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.
- uslic001 14y agoAny 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.
- diroussel 14y agoiPhone supports CardDAV and CalDAV, so this same tutorial will work with iOS I assume.
- hbharadwaj 14y agoWindows 8 allows you to merge contacts. Once you clean up your contacts on Windows, it's pretty good. Well, at least, has been for me.
- mark_l_watson 14y agoNice 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.
- tiziano88 14y agoNot sure that's a smart move, if you care about your data. Do you think you can achieve better uptime and reliability than Google does with their engineers and servers and distributed data centres? I mean, it sounds cool and everything to do it yourself, but if you just dump all your data onto your local server (or EC2 instance), it's just a centralised storage that can fail any time, not a "cloud" any more.
- mark_l_watson 14y agoExcept that I use cron jobs to save my mongodb and postgres databases to S3. The only thing I lose is perhaps being offline fr several hours if one of my servers goes south.
- UnoriginalGuy 14y agoI 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.
- eddieroger 14y agoThat's discomforting, because I just installed it. I don't really need or want the filesharing bits, but a shared family calendar has been a holy grail for my family for a while now, and this seemed to be the quickest and closest way of doing it cross-platform.
- UnoriginalGuy 14y agoIt is a great product when it works correctly. So you should definitely give it a shot.
- eddieroger 14y agoI am, and I've been using it as my personal calendar for about two weeks now. So far it seems fine enough, but a little wonky around editing events that repeat. Honestly, probably lack of training - I haven't spent more than 15 minutes with it per sitting, and stopped actively tinkering once I got CalDAV working.
- Terretta 14y ago> a shared family calendar has been a holy grail for my family for a while now Out of curiosity, what's wrong with clicking the "Share" button on an iCal, sorry, iCloud Calendar? My family (incl those on Windows) finds this works well.
- eddieroger 14y ago
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- twodayslate 14y agoSite is down. will this solution sync with my iPhone?
- cyxxon 14y agoownCloud does sync with iPhone, yes. I am still basically on Google myself, but did a trial install of ownCloud and it worked pretty much instantly. Just add as CalDAV and CardDAV accounts on the iPhone, the correct addresses to use is shown in ownCloud somewhere.
- wodow 14y agohttps://fruux.com/ https://fruux.com/ is a great alternative.
- mhw 14y agoSo 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.
- mikegioia 14y agoI came here to say the same thing. The two titles are actually completely different topics (ha)!
- modernerd 14y agoI moved to http://www.atmailcloud.com 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.
- bdowney 14y agoThanks for the info. I'd happily for a service like this than rely on Google's "free" stuff that they might the plug on any time they want to push their useless G+ crap.
- Karunamon 14y agoThis 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!
- mikeratcliffe 14y agoNo, the loss of contacts happened for the first time about 3 years ago and has repeated roughly every 6 months. I don't understand why you think that Google have a better backup service than I can provide myself. I could backup my DB once per hour if I wanted. I am not anti Google but if a better service can be run from my own server then of course I will use it.
- dudus 14y agoSo you think your hard drive is more reliable than a Google Data Center?
- nathanb 14y agoNo, but I suspect I care more deeply about my own data than Google do.
- haakon 14y agoI'm sure Google quite loves your data.
- nathanb 14y agoBut if they lose it, do they care? It's one drop in the bucket of their analytics. The incentives I have to preserve my data are greater than the incentives they have. On their side, they have some very bright minds and some very deep pockets, as well as a proven infrastructure. But if they lose my data, they lose some analytics which may cost them pennies or perhaps dollars of ad revenue. On my side, I have myself and whatever advice I can cobble together from friends and the Internet, a reasonable salary, and the occasional hour or two of spare time. But if I lose my data, I lose over a decade of accumulated emails and contact information. I will gladly allow Google to back up my data (I use gmail to archive my call logs and SMS messages right now, in fact!), but I would rather be in control of the primary copy myself.
- rdl 14y agoWhile 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.
- jimktrains2 14y agoThe 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.
- MattJ100 14y agoMmm. I'm sure people have had bad experiences. However I run my own mail server (and no others who also do) for myself, my company and a few other domains I host with almost no effort. It's true I have fewer than a dozen users, but I'm sure most people would be the same way. I just upgraded it this weekend, otherwise I haven't actually had to touch it in the 5 years since I originally set it up. Support ends for the Ubuntu LTS release it was based on next month, and I chose to migrate to new server software (dovecot) without much difficulty at all. I think anyone moderately skilled with sysadmin tendencies could manage it. A good guide is here (though I am not running the described spam or virus filtering, and neither am I using EC2 myself): http://www.exratione.com/2012/05/a-mailserver-on-ubuntu-1204-postfix-dovecot-mysql/ http://www.exratione.com/2012/05/a-mailserver-on-ubuntu-1204... - there are many other guides online. But I confess I personally have a gmail account that I use most of all. I receive lots of mail daily, and none of the open-source clients (webmail or otherwise) have managed to compare in terms of usability. Priority Inbox is the most recent example of something that I would struggle to live without.
- jimktrains2 14y agoWhat about other people's spam filters? That's the biggest problem I've heard about is being blacklisted because of being an unknown sender or on some VPS service or something like that.
- iamtherockstar 14y agoAndroid 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.
- jvdh 14y ago"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...
- reeses 14y agoSome people have the pathological habit of creating meeting requests and attaching 500KB+ spreadsheets, project plans, Word docs, etc. It's best when they send it as a recurring appointment and then send an "updated" version in a separate email.
- jvdh 14y agoStill the performance of the database is going to be negligible if you take the network (probably wifi/cellular) and mostly background syncing into account.
- gregorynicholas 14y agothis 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..
- bernardom 14y agoCalendar is a bit harder, but storing contacts seems like an eminently solvable problem. Especially if you require dropbox. What am I missing? Phone support?
- __abc 14y agoIf 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?
- EvanAnderson 14y agoI've self-hosted my calendar using DAViCal (http://www.davical.org/ 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.
- sn 14y agoWhat you're looking for is syncml: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.
- mariuolo 14y agoPersonally I use the free version of Zarafa for that. In any case I know who to blame if things go south.