Welcome to this living document on how to properly, and completely, migrate from Apple iCloud + iTunes to your own Nextcloud. I’ve turned on wiki edit mode for this top post, because I trust you to help me and respect this post.
Methods
Getting all of your data out of your Apple devices can be tricky. Hopefully we can share working methods.
iTunes - Backups to iCloud are limited to 5g on standard plan, but an an offline backup can also be selected.
Goals. Please add More.
iCloud - Contacts + Calendars can be migrated here, then downloaded from iCloud as VCF, etc.
iTunes - Voice Memos can migrate (under iTunes Music) to iCloud as m4a.
Photos + Files may be added from Files app on an iOS device, moving them directly to the Nextcloud application where they can sync over…
Location Data = Unknown
Apple Notes = Unknown
Migrating your MacOS Computer
List item
As this shapes up, we’ll continue to organize it cleanly. Feel free link to any and all earlier forum topics on this. Thanks, and please confirm that you are able to edit this post while respecting what already exists.
One very critical thing is availability and reliability. Once you put something in a professional cloud like iCloud, the probability for that cloud not to be available is VERY low. Also, the risk for that cloud to loose your data is even lower.
Should you improvise a home-made cloud, it will be very hard to reach such a high level for availability and reliability. I did here, but I am not the average guy and my setup is above what most company are doing themselves.
Core server is Dell R-820 running ESXi 6.7U3
Nextcloud is the official docker container running in an Alpine Docker Host as a VM
pfSense is both the Internet and server firewall
Data and database backups are encrypted before being saved in my 1st FreeNAS server.
That server is rock solid (ZFS, mirrors, snapshots) and do ZFS replication to FreeNAS No2 and No3
FreeNAS No2 is also rock solid and is 400 Km away to protect against physical incident.
FreeNAS No3 is still strong and is kept offline between 2 backups to protect against logical incidents.
On top of that, I do regular restore tests to ensure my backups are working.
So until someone reaches that level, he must not fool himself : his cloud is far to be as safe as a professional cloud like iCloud.
And there are not that many who can achieve such a high level of professionalism in their home-made cloud…
I focussed my security around the DATA more than the service. The reason is that I have way too many single point of failures to do service-level availability. I do not want to put my frontend in another cloud like Amazon. It would kind of defeat the purpose of running my own cloud.
So Yes, my --service-- can go down, but I will always preserve my data. My service is pretty robust thanks to server-grade hardware, software and maintenance procedure, but still not completely HA.