Ben Sturmfels

Ben Sturmfels at

Following a "phone went for a swim" incident, I've just replaced my wife's Nexus S (Replicant) with a Galaxy S2. Took under 30 mins to flash Replicant, restore contacts, private calendar and shared calendar from our ownCloud server; set photo instant uploading using ownCloud app; encrypt SMSs with SMSSecure and add custom alarm to remind us to lock the chickens up at night. :)

Some days it feels like we're missing a lot of convenience by living the free software life, but not today.

Grey Moon Driver, j1mc, Douglas Perkins, Efraim Flashner likes this.

Same experience migrating phones here.

That said, it's still not a seamless, one-login experience.

I've been thinking, of late, at what a configuration file should look like to bootstrap a new phone, with information such as IMAP/SMTP details, Ca(l|rd)DAV, support applications, F-Droid repos and such all stored in one place; hopefully ownCloud, so you would just log in to that, and sync everything back.

Olivier Mehani at 2016-02-25T23:55:57Z

That would be a really interesting project to work on. It might also help to modularise these services and provide good defaults for things like backup, which I always struggle to get around to.

Ben Sturmfels at 2016-02-27T23:41:37Z

Oh, yeah, backup. I actually gave in and *bought* Titanium Backup.

Sadly, out of all the cloud storage they support, ownCloud isn't one of them, and my support request has gone nowhere.

And of course, I can't get the code, so no way to do it myself...

Olivier Mehani at 2016-02-28T01:48:51Z