Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Of course, I don’t want anyone diving in completely blind, some basic knowledge, research, and interest are definitely needed. But if someone decides they really want to keep their data safe and under their own control, even something like family photos, they should be able to get started in a simpler way. Then, once the first step doesn’t seem too intimidating, they can deepen their technical skills. The goal of Safebox isn’t to replace that knowledge, just to make self hosting more accessible.

@[email protected] I absolutely love your comments! You’ve chimed in on several of my posts already, and you always share such interesting stories and enthusiasm. I really hope it stays that way, keep being as passionate and helpful as you are, the self hosting community could use more people like you

@[email protected] Yeah, it can definitely feel really complicated, especially when you’re just starting out. That’s actually one of the reasons we created Safebox, we went through the same struggles ourselves. We’re also working on proper documentation so others can better understand and learn from it.

By the way, is there a specific self hosted app you had in mind for storing the maps and documents you mentioned?

Thanks, must’ve missed that

I really like what you’re doing, keep it up!

Yeah, it’s similar to Yunohost or Sandstorm in that you can run self-hosted apps easily, but the main difference with Safebox is that it runs on any os with a single docker command. You don’t need to mess with terminals or commands afterward. Like Yunohost, you can install and manage apps through a web interface, while Safebox also adds geo-redundant backups and optional remote access,all in one interface.

Safebox is more about making it easier for home users to run self-hosted applications. You just need to run a single docker command, and the program will set up the web interface, application installation, SSL, reverse proxy, and optional remote access and geo-redundant backups. Cosmos cloud has more enterprise-level features, such as SSO, 2FA, and anti-DDoS, but it is also more complex

Thanks a lot for the kind words and the nice feedback.

The idea and most of the core development came from my father-in-law, he started it years ago with one of his friends. My partner and I joined later to help mostly with testing ,using it, and coming up with ideas for what features might make it more practical for everyday use. We spent a lot of time researching similar projects and reading through community discussions to see what people were saying about their experiences and needs in the self-hosted world. We really care about keeping everything simple and transparent, so the UI and website design were done by another friend of my father-in-law.

We know there’s still a lot left to do, and that it’ll probably keep cutting into our sunday lunches 😄 but we hope it’ll end up being something genuinely useful for others too

Thank you so much for your valuable feedback and kind words.

About the VPN configuration transfer, we’ve thought about it a lot, and in the end this seemed like the best solution: we hide the config behind a long random URL make it available for 5 minutes, and then delete the link. So, in theory an unauthorized user would have only five minutes to guess the URL and gain access. If you have a better idea, I’d really appreciate it.

As for backup_challenge_clients.sh it’s still a work in progress. It doesn’t work in the current beta version, and none of its features are available in the web interface yet. We’ll let you know once it’s implemented.

We’ll fix the nginx config, I promise 🙂 Just keep in mind this isn’t meant to be a public-facing site yet, since there’s no user authentication for now. But we’ll definitely review the web server setup too.

Thanks again for all your feedback, please keep helping us improve