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Setting up your own Nextcloud instance to get off of Google

283 points by kmclean 6y ago

Brainspackle 6y ago
someone please help me understand all the hype about nextcloud. I've tried it and found it to be a bloated mess. Why would I want to run this over several smaller apps that do the job better, just without a fancy (if you could call it that) UI to tie it all together
- kmclean 6y ago
  For me it was just the convenience of being able to have most of my cloud things in one place (like calendar, reminders, contacts, notes, etc). I suspect it's probably not the best solution for each of those individually, and I'm definitely curious what other options are out there, but it's quite a convenient drop-in replacement for a lot of Google's cloud offerings for people who are looking for alternatives. Also I should note I don't actually ever use the nextcloud UI itself, I don't disagree it can feel a bit clunky sometimes. I use 3rd party clients and use my personal cloud to sync everything via webDAV and cardDAV.
- kenniskrag 6y ago
  less maintanance? Which apps do you use?
- indigodaddy 6y ago
  It seems to have remained quite popular, so there must be reasons why people like it. Someone else just replied “less maintenance,” but I think a lot of it does have to do with a single webpage/all-in-one portal type application where you can do all the “my things” at. Eg, sandstorm is in that sort of category. It is pretty convenient. Note I have played around with sandstorm but never used next cloud. And sandstorm is very different too, don’t want to get too carried away in comparing them.
  - kenniskrag 6y ago
    link: https://sandstorm.io/ https://sandstorm.io/
  - mkl 6y ago
    Sandstorm was a neat idea, but unfortunately it seems like it is nearly dead: https://sandstorm.io/news/2019-09-15-shutting-down-oasis https://sandstorm.io/news/2019-09-15-shutting-down-oasis > As much as I love Sandstorm, it’s hard to come home from my successful day job to work on an unsuccessful side project. And so, I have been spending less and less time on Sandstorm. I still push updates every month to keep the dependencies fresh, but hadn’t worked on any new features in about a year and a half before adding mass transfers recently. > Meanwhile, without leadership, the community has mostly disbanded. The only app that gets regular updates anymore is Wekan, thanks to its maintainer Lauri “xet7” Ojansivu. Jake Weisz heroically continues to carry the Sandstorm flag, reviewing app submissions (mostly from Lauri), replying to questions and bug reports, and advocating Sandstorm around the internet. A couple others lurk on the mailing list and IRC. Most people have moved on. > Almost all the app packages are from 2015-2016; many of those apps have had significant updates in their standalone versions since then which are missing on Sandstorm.
    - kentonv 6y ago
      FWIW, this post came after that one, and there has been somewhat more development activity this year compared to last: https://sandstorm.io/news/2020-02-03-reviving-sandstorm https://sandstorm.io/news/2020-02-03-reviving-sandstorm
- DarthGhandi 6y ago
  Wondering what you use instead? I run nextcloud on a $5 vps just like in this article, it's still underutilised. Out of the box my family can have access to certain folders and their own account, they can watch videos in the browser and I can have a selfhosted google docs/sheets alternative. All encrypted at rest.
- JadoJodo 6y ago
  Agreed. I used it for about two months and spent dozens of hours trying to help friends/family troubleshoot random glitches the clients had, the unintuitive encryption settings and hugely underwhelming performance that comes with S3-type storage. I loved the idea but it really is a bloated mess and I couldn’t trust it to work when I needed it to.
  - canofbars 6y ago
    Tried remote storage and its slow like you mention, but once I ran it on a ryzen desktop with a hdd for storage the whole thing is incredibly fast and works great.
    - indigodaddy 6y ago
      Hmmm, I have a small BuyVM Ryzen-based KVM vm (I think lives on local SSD storage but can’t remember) that’s been idling for quite some time— might have to give it a whirl, thanks.
      - away_throw 6y ago
        Still waiting on a Luxembourg KVM slice to come in stock.
    - acquacow 6y ago
      I use it over gigabit fios and get 68MB/sec transfer speeds to/from my nextcloud instance at home. I don't usually get that much with google drive/etc...
- sean_pedersen 6y ago
  I concur. I am happy with my lean setup: - SyncThing: decentralized, fast & unix aligned - CryptPad: end-to-end encrypted, real-time collaborative editing
- canofbars 6y ago
  It just works and does everything. I run it on a ryzen "server" and its super snappy and does everything I need. Its the glue between my apple and linux devices which makes interacting with files between them almost seamless.
- bassman9000 6y ago
  bloated mess Same. Setting up v20 for a customer these days. Heavy, slow. Buggy LDAP. Not easily containerized: official Docker image tries to rsync ALL the distribution from /usr to /var/www/html every time your start run the container, and you can't mount individual volumes (e.g. just data), because they keep the config at /var/www/html/config.php Customer just wants a UI for a filesystem, and I'd gladly replace it if I could.
- j45 6y ago
  Low / no maintenance of services and software is huge. The cloud seems maintenance free until the plan or features change or go away altogether.
cameronperot 6y ago
I would suggest Hetzner's storage share (their managed Nextcloud hosting) [1]. Their pricing starts at €2.90/mo for 100GB of storage, which is significantly cheaper than what is mentioned in the post ($5/mo for 25GB). [1] https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share
- kmclean 6y ago
  Yeah it's actually cheaper (and simpler :) ) to sign up with a nextcloud provider if all you want is a nextcloud account. There are other reasons to run your own instance, but honestly I think most of them come down to the hacker novelty factor. One noteworthy one is having total control over your own data, I guess. Depending on the provider it's not always simple to export all of your data to migrate somewhere else if you ever want to. For folks who would use nextcloud if they didn't have to care about all this server admin stuff I would definitely recommend Hetzner. Cloudamo [1] is also a good option with servers in North America, for people there who care about location. [1] https://cloudamo.com/store/nextcloud https://cloudamo.com/store/nextcloud
- mkl 6y ago
  That page seems focused on the file storage aspect. Does Storage Share also include other Nextcloud features like calendar?
  - stfwn 6y ago
    Yes, I'm also using Hetzner and have not run into any limits in what plugins you can install and use yet. They used to call 'storage share' just 'Nextcloud', but moved it to the new name for licensing reasons. I don't know what type of hardware they're running their Nextcloud instances on, but I've been using calendar/contacts and public file sharing (since Firefox Send went down) on the cheapest plan for a while now and it's fine. I also dabbled a bit in using Nextcloud's maps, video calling, bookmarks and rss reader applications and it all works OK, although I didn't stick to them because they're not the most rich in features. I had to Hetzner email support a few times and got a helpful reply within 1-2 work days, sometimes quicker, which I thought was fine.
jbj 6y ago
one month ago, I set up nextcloud on a rasperry pi with snap. It required very little work to get going, and most services are pretty decent. The only thing in the pack that I didnt like that much was the document editor, where letters appeared in the wrong order when typing too fast. this could possibly be due to running the ARM version of the backbone. But then there are other ways to edit documents, and the rest of the default tools well done. it is also possible to get different plugins as well as there are many apps on f-droid that integrate nicely
- josephg 6y ago
  > this could possibly be due to running the ARM version of the backbone. As someone who's worked on more than a few collaborative text editors through the years, this just sounds like a correctness bug in how they're processing typing events.
  - jamra 6y ago
    It sounds like it to me as well. We had the same bug with content editable fields and changing then index of the selection, which is where the cursor appears.
flatiron 6y ago
I’m a solo person on google enterprise for $20 a month. It sadly cannot be beat. Unlimited storage (almost 40TB) and email is all I care about and it works pretty much flawlessly (besides this weeks outage). I wouldn’t want to have the hassle of running it myself nor the price of storing all that data. So sadly I remain with google.
- ipsum2 6y ago
  I'm on a similar plan, but I'm worried about the forced upgrade to Google Workspace, which would reduce the amount of storage to 2-5TB per user. I imagine it'll be mandatory soon.
- nkrisc 6y ago
  > Unlimited storage (almost 40TB) Huh? One of those is finite and the other is not.
  - the_svd_doctor 6y ago
    It means he has 40TB stored I guess.
  - throwaway201103 6y ago
    40TB is essentially infinite unless you're doing something with large amounts of media content.
  - flatiron 6y ago
    i am using 40TB out of unlimited. you are right, that was not clear in my comment
- nominated1 6y ago
  Not to mention you’re less likely to get hit with ransomware. Nextcloud pwnage seems much more likely.
  - j45 6y ago
    Putting anything behind a firewall in combination with a VPN can be relatively turn key and self patching without too much effort. Docker wi5 a tool like proxmox can go a very, very long way in a matter of a few days... and provide near identical vps maintainability. Hardware is much more reliable and self monitoring than it used to be.
centimeter 6y ago
I tried nextcloud for a couple months earlier this year and found it to be overcomplicated poorly engineered junk. It was super unreliable on iPhone. Simple things that should have worked perfectly, like uploading or downloading files, were very unreliable. There’s a certain class of software, usually written these days in a PHP, python, or JS, where there’s a big focus on making it “easy to use” or having a nice UI that usually accomplishes neither and you also have to contend with the underlying software being bad. At this point, the only solution I’ve found to the kind of self-hosting stuff nextcloud provides are various utilities built on top of SSH — like rsync (which works perfectly) - or samba (which works OK). I haven’t found anything that really works well on iOS.
- alpaca128 6y ago
  I learned the hard way that you should never, ever put huge (as in many files) directories on Nextcloud. In my case a couple Git repos. It worked fine at first but after a while it got really confused, to a point where Nextcloud randomly decided that the older version on the server was actually the more recent one, and synced that folder back onto my local, updated repository. And I was the only person touching those folders, the Nextcloud server was only used as a backup during that period. It's got a couple neat features, but problems like this are really not excusable. When the one core feature breaks in everyday situations for users doing version control it's not a good look.
- rixed 6y ago
  Very same experience here, except that I ended up with a simple webdav server to share with family and friends. And it was already quite frustrating to realize how few servers are available and how many client applications pretending to support that rather simple protocol were actually not working properly. Tells a lot about how badly selfhosting have fallen out of fashion. I can remember a time when you would get better service when hosting your own file sharing, emails, DNS, VoIP... and plenty of good free software servers for everything to choose from, but it seems not to be the case any more.
mistrial9 6y ago
happy nextcloud admin here - sticking with v18 for now since I have no use for office-calendar things. File sharing links and the video chat working just fine, using it for small team meetings and it works well enough. At some later date, I might look at some of the many, many cloud transfer protocols supported under-the-hood (as seen by looking through the installed php source files).
mastazi 6y ago
Additional note: Nextcloud also comes as part of Mail-in-a-Box (MIAB). If you are using that version of Nextcloud, you need to know the following: 1- It uses SQLite, you can't change this easily as the same SQLite is also accessed by MIAB to sync contacts and calendar functionality. The Nextcloud devs don't recommend SQLite for multi user servers. [1] 2- MIAB supports using Nextcloud for managing contacts and calendar but file management is not officially supported so if you want to use that same installation of Nextcloud for storing your files, you won't get support from the MIAB devs in relation to any issue related to files storage [2] (in that case you will have to seek help from the Nexcloud community). 3- As a result of the 2 points above, for multiuser installations you may want to have a second instance of Nextcloud, backed by Postgres or MariaDB, just for your files storage, while you can keep using the version included in MIAB for contacts and calendar. However, for a single user installation, you would be fine using the version of Nextcloud that comes in MIAB (I have been doing that for a long time and I'm fine, mine is a single-user system). 4- The version of Nextcloud that is included in MIAB by default locks access to the admin interface, this can be unlocked using the provided script [3] 5- The automated backups that MIAB creates, will also include all your Nextcloud flies, not just email, calendar and contacts. So if you have a lot of files it's a good idea to use the S3 backup functionality instead of the default on-disk backup method (otherwise backups files will soon eat up all your storage). In my case I use the MIAB S3 backups feature, and I save my data in Digitalocean Spaces which is S3-compatible [4] [1] https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/stable/admin_manual/configuration_database/db_conversion.html?highlight=convert%20sqlite https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/stable/admin_manual/config... [2] See par. "What’s inside the box?" https://mailinabox.email/ https://mailinabox.email/ [3] https://github.com/mail-in-a-box/mailinabox/blob/master/tools/owncloud-unlockadmin.sh https://github.com/mail-in-a-box/mailinabox/blob/master/tool... [4] https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/spaces/resources/s3-sdk-examples/ https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/spaces/resources/s3-sdk-ex...
bilal4hmed 6y ago
I'm glad some of yall are mentioning cost. These articles while awesome usually don't mention the cost to operate and support such endeavors. I would like to host my own Matrix instance, but I have no idea what the cost would be monthly.
- indigodaddy 6y ago
  Oracle Cloud has the best Compute/VM Always Free Tier around (2x 1G RAM/50G VMs), which is likely sufficient for a small matrix/synapse server, so realistically you could do it for zero. I don’t know how much network transfer is included in their free tier, however (I’ve looked but never seen it clearly stated anywhere).
  - bilal4hmed 6y ago
    thank you so much for this, didnt know they had such a gracious free tier. The only thing I saw was "Outbound Data Transfer: 10 TB per month." but you are absolutely right, it isn't spelt out directly.
    - indigodaddy 6y ago
      Ah ok I think I remember that and I wasn’t sure it that was linked to the LB service or the VMs. Perhaps/likely it’s either/both. In any case, wow 10TB is awesome. I think Google Cloud’s Free Tier transfer limit is 1G, which is one of the reasons I powered it down (the other being they started charging for external IP’s on the free tier compute instances).
    - indigodaddy 6y ago
      Also they have Oracle Linux 8 as an OS option for free tier, so you’re covered if you prefer the EL ecosystem (eg given the current CentOS situation).
  - auggierose 6y ago
    So, what, Google is bad now, and Oracle good? Funny world.
newman314 6y ago
Has anyone setup/used multi user calendaring and contacts on NextCloud? Currently considering this vs. a few standalone docker instances for calendars/contacts for one of my downtime projects over the next few weeks...
- randoramax 6y ago
  Does nextcloud still use caldav/carddav?
  - gpanders 6y ago
    Yes
- bklaasen 6y ago
  Yes, it works well. I moved all my contacts and calendaring from Gmail to a self-hosted Nextcloud instance about two years ago. My wife and I have a calendars in common, both of which are set up as the default calendars on our mobile devices. We recently discussed having a shared address book too. Shouldn't be any trouble to set up. One of us will own it, farm out r/w access to the other, and we'll transfer contacts we ought to have in common piecemeal. CalDAV and CardDAV. In general, Nextcloud has been transformative in allowing us to move off Google products. All our music and photos are on Nextcloud too.
  - travelingwave 6y ago
    I've been thinking of switching to my gmail calendar and contacts to nextcloud. But I've been wondering what you then do about contacts you email. Do you somehow keep gmail in sync with the nextcloud contacts?
- bityard 6y ago
  I have been running OwnCloud/Nextcloud for a very long time. For me, the Calendar is the killer feature. It Just Works. Everyone in the household has an account and we share calendars with each other. You can use whatever client you want (Thunderbird, Android, Apple devices) but the web UI is really excellent and easy to use as well. My biggest gripe with Nextcloud is that upgrading between major versions is a pain and they release upgrades often. If my VPS didn't have other duties as well, I would probably switch to a hosted version.
testxyz 6y ago
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buzzerbetrayed 6y ago
The one thing really keeping me from getting off Google is YouTube. For everything else there are good alternatives. But YouTube really is the only viable player in the online video game.
- sneak 6y ago
  I created a dedicated throwaway gmail account just for YouTube premium, it was the last/only service on Google I was still using. It seems they've killed off all of the working public invidious instances.
- duiker101 6y ago
  I am still looking for a decent Google Maps alternative. And not about navigation, I never use that, what I care about it's reviews. TripAdvisor is okish when it comes to restaurants but Google just have the advantage of having review for ANYTHING. Still haven't found a competitor that does anything close to that.
  - 867-5309 6y ago
    I'm always surprised at the lack of content on OpenStreetMaps, 99 times out of 100 when you click a point of interest there are no photos, reviews, or even a basic description
    - raffraffraff 6y ago
      Yet they still have that restaurant that closed 5 years ago.
- kmclean 6y ago
  Yeah I still use youtube sometimes, but I do it without an account. You do lose a lot, like remembering what you watched and better recommendations, but you also win some, like Google not remembering what you watched :)
- nobody9999 6y ago
  >The one thing really keeping me from getting off Google is YouTube. For everything else there are good alternatives. But YouTube really is the only viable player in the online video game. The thing I hate most is ads. And YouTube (unless you pay them) gets ever more aggressive with showing ads. The pre-roll ads are bad enough, but interrupting a playing video with a couple of ads (as happened to me the other day) is way beyond the pale. I guess I need to take a closer look at integrating youtube-dl into my Mythtv environment and otherwise just ignore YT (as I do all of Google's other herding tools).
nr2x 6y ago
I had a few instances of OwnCloud and various NAS setups over the years. Then I had a kid and dumped everything into iCloud when I realized I’d no longer have time to keep it all secure/patched. Time cost of these setups is real.
- kmclean 6y ago
  Yeah I'm a little worried about the maintenance burden, tbh. I'm not actually a linux/sysadmin type person, but I was pretty keen to achieve my goal of being Google free by 2021 (which I'm happy to announce with this migration that I did :), though I still watch youtube anonymously sometimes). But I'm not sure it'll be the most ideal solution for the long term. I'll see what the maintenance burden actually is like through next year. Some folks have suggested looking at the docker installation options (as opposed to the snap package, which I use here), since it's apparently really easy to maintain. We'll see.
  - behringer 6y ago
    I think buying a NAS with all the built in software you need is a more sensible approach for the average enthusiast. But nextcloud is cool too.
  - Shared404 6y ago
    One option which is what I've been doing is just using SFTP. I find that that reduces the maintenance burden to just keeping a machine running and patched. I also set up a read-only web frontend with NGINX's directory indexing + htaccess so I can share files easily.
    - rakoo 6y ago
      This is also the direction I'm taking. It makes everything just easier when everything is file-driven, backups are simpler, and when nothing works anymore the basics always work.
    - LinuxBender 6y ago
      A client that works really well with SFTP is lftp. It is in most linux distros and is available for mac in brew and in cygwin for windows. It has a mirror subsystem that works nearly like rsync and can support SFTP + chroot. Combine that with rsnapshot for diffs and you can fall back to earlier versions without using a lot of disk space. You can put that rsnapshot location outside of the SFTP chroot so that malicious access can't wreck your data, or just make the directory above your rsnapshots root-only access so regular users in a non chroot environment can't get there.
gramakri 6y ago
Great to see this article here :-) nextcloud is easily one of the most popular apps on our platform cloudron and it's for selfhosters what wordpress is for web hosters (meaning: a love/hate relationship). Happy to answer any questions on next cloud.
ArchD 6y ago
Nextcloud and owncloud are written in PHP like so are many other web server apps, especially wiki servers. I've always had misgivings about the security of using and running PHP. Does PHP software still tend to be insecure as in the past? Why are there so many web apps (especially wiki servers) written in PHP instead of e.g. Python, Rust or some other language?
- ronlobo 6y ago
  Yeah it is, don't use it. All the advancements on PHP are great, it's becoming a JAVA more and more, but likely any PHP legacy apps will never see an upgrade to the latest version. And starting a new project in PHP, nah, there are better more well designed programming languages.
- ronlobo 6y ago
  They even had to come up with their own security scanner (https://scan.nextcloud.com/ https://scan.nextcloud.com/). I assume because they don't even trust their own code mess or cause you can f-up your PHP conf in so many ways that your server becomes vulnerable.
  - PZ81JUXJE7uJ 6y ago
    Yeah, only PHP software needs audits and quality testing. /s
acquacow 6y ago
Setup nextcloud 2 years ago as part of a FreeNAS install. It runs in a jail and dumps my files to the local, shared filesystem as a result. I also put the nextcloud clients on my phone so that my photos auto-upload to my NAS vs google photos. It's been quite nice to be able to just drop files to it, right click, then share someone a link to those files.
- 627467 6y ago
  Is this hosted on dynamic IP? How do you handle that so mobile clients can auto-upload to the server?
  - johnchristopher 6y ago
    There are two options I think: a VPN or a dynamic DNS like duckdns.
  - acquacow 6y ago
    Non-static IP, all done via dns updates. Never had an issue.
homedrive 6y ago
shameless ad: looking for a simpler way to host nextcloud? try homedrive[1] :) [1]: https://homedrive.io https://homedrive.io
- yumuzi 6y ago
  so no recurring changes for upgrade and maintenance?
  - homedrive 6y ago
    no recurring charges (at least for now). the only recurring cost is electricity cost for self-serving at home.
- haram_masala 6y ago
  This is great! Self-promotion or not, thanks for sharing.
nfriedly 6y ago
Does anybody have a good recommendation for an automated Gmail backup? I am happy using Gmail for now, I just want my own copy of all of my emails that I can search and read - offline if necessary. I tried to use Nextcloud's email app to backup my gmail, but after sending it up I realized that it is just an alternate interface to access email on Google's server, not a proper backup solution. (It only supports IMAP, not POP3.) If I can't find a better solution, I may just set up Thunderbird and put it and POP3 mode, but I'd really prefer something that could sit on a server and run automatically without me having to touch it. (For what it's worth, I ended up keeping my Nextcloud server set up because I found that I really like the notes app. I also have it doing a daily backup of my contacts from my phone and it's replaced Dropbox for small file storage. I already had my photos backing up to a Plex instance on the same server, or else I would probably be using the photo backup feature as well. )
- asoplata 6y ago
  I recommend using isync (aka mbsync) https://isync.sourceforge.io/ https://isync.sourceforge.io/ to download an offline, IMAP-style copy of your email; it seems to be faster than offlineimap http://www.offlineimap.org/ http://www.offlineimap.org/ which does the same thing. Many people have it run on a simple cron job. You can then use Thunderbird etc. on your full local copy of the mailbox.
  - nfriedly 6y ago
    Thank you, I'll try that out!
- g_p 6y ago
  Getmail is probably your best bet for an automated email backup - that will fetch your email over IMAP (getmail-gmail-xoauth-tokens can use oauth to connect to IMAP) and store it as a maildir or mbox. You can then use that with whatever client or search system you like. You could then use this maildir as the backend for a dovecot IMAP server and use any webmail client of your choosing to connect to this and search it etc. I'd avoid POP3 - very old protocol and it removes your mail from the server (is this your goal?). You're definitely better using IMAP. Even if you want to delete mail from the server, you're probably safer to fetch it by IMAP, then delete it.
busterarm 6y ago
The hardest thing people need to ween themselves off of is email, which I didn't see mentioned here at all. Many people don't think there are viable Gmail alternatives, but on Drew DeVault's recommendation I recently switched myself over to using Migadu[1] and the experience has been fantastic. That said, I am running CalDAV and CardDAV at home on my own hardware, but they do offer a simple version of both that should be usable. [1]:https://migadu.com https://migadu.com
- kmclean 6y ago
  I use Protonmail (with a custom domain) for email, so I didn't include anything about that here. It's possible to do with Nextcloud, too (and maybe I should look into it now that I have this.. would probably be cheaper), but seems like a bit more work to set up your own mail server. Several people have recommended mailinabox to me.
- thombles 6y ago
  Take care with Migadu if you use mailing lists. I troubleshooted some issues with bounces earlier this year and both users in question were using Migadu - they had ended up with the unusually strict "p=reject" DMARC policy. Every time they sent an email to the list I was on, my account would (correctly) trigger a bounce and after several of these incidents _my_ subscription would be removed from the mailing list for too many bounces. I'm not even sure whose fault this situation is, but it's something to keep in mind.
docsaintly 6y ago
I recommend NethServer or YunoHost which can install nextcloud as a module, along with many other services, and can be easily updated with security patches. Freedombox may become a contender some day too. Its one thing to set it up, and it's another thing to keep it running stable and secure.
markshepard 6y ago
FileCloud Community Edition (https://www.getfilecloud.com/filecloud-community-edition/ https://www.getfilecloud.com/filecloud-community-edition/) is another viable option for self-hosted file sync and sharing. It runs on top of windows and linux. The installation takes just couple of seconds
2Gkashmiri 6y ago
Can any nextcloud user suggest why to use nextcloud instead of a network drive for a small office where everything is done offline and within LAN ? Mapped network drive is painlessly easy. Open file manager, click any file and you are there. There isnt much for "collaboration" when you can just talk face to face. I really want to use nextcloud for managing files but I could not find a satisfactory answer. Oh, I have a daily file backup meaning I can get any copy of a file from last year so that is covered.
- KingOfCoders 6y ago
  I've used FreeNas for some years in out startup and now NextCloud for some years at home. FreeNas feels much more stable. If you only work in an office I'd use network drives they are less hassle than syncing (though mixed environments with osx and smb are a pain) If you need the files with you, use NextCloud.
  - 2Gkashmiri 6y ago
    Oh.. yeah. A bunch of laptops have Linux on them and it gets tiring sometimes to having to overwrite each file when saving. Though fuse is supposed to fix that on plasma at least. I kinda havent switched because of that reason only. I dont need data outside of the lan network and for outside I use zerotier so I always have that network drive. Good to have options. Maybe one day I might switch everyone but that would be a lot of trouble
    - KingOfCoders 6y ago
      +1 for zerotier - I use NextCloud over zerotier.
Daegalus 6y ago
I really tried to like Nextcloud. I set it up multiple times. And it was a giant cluttered mess of a UI, things worked poorly, and as much as I want to be ok with a PHP app, I don't trust PHP. And its not because I want it to be JS web app or anything like that. Just the core HTML/CSS is poorly implemented and just doesn't look good. The calendar and addons system just work so poorly. I just cant use it. I just use Seafile for filesharing. I've run my own email before, also a pain in the ass for spam management. I do own my own domain and use ImprovMX.com to forward it to a free Gmail account. So if I ever need move, I can do it quickly and easily by just changing the forward. I'm not privacy conscious so I don't really care to run from Google for that reason, I just am tired of them shutting down and killing services I use often. I just haven't hit an email service that matches the spam fighting powers of Google yet. or the UI. Everything else looks so traditional. and I don't want to pay $99 for Hey, mostly only do month to month so I can easily cancel and not waste money if I want to stop using it. Anyways, I digress. I just haven't found the right combination of tools for me, but Nextcloud was not it. I honestly think its horribly designed. We need an alternative to it, but I know its a huge undertaking to make something like this, so I am not sure it will happen any time soon.
antman 6y ago
Ok I have the nextcloud setup, now how can I backup my iphone gallery? Haven't found a frictionless way to do that except icloud.
- kmclean 6y ago
  There's an iOS app you can configure to automatically upload your photos to your nextcloud so they're available from anywhere (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/nextcloud/id1125420102 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/nextcloud/id1125420102). You might want to set up Backblaze or similar for external storage, though, if you're using a small VPS you might fill up the storage pretty quickly.
KingOfCoders 6y ago
I use NextCloud for some years now. I hate the syncing which destroyed several files. Another problem is files that need to go together like git source directories e.g NextCloud easily screws that up, my with "lost" the text of her novel if we didn't had backups. Their technology is miles behind OneDrive/Dropbox and they seam to not care but add features that enable them to attract new customers instead of fixing the core. When you need to use Office products nothing beats OneDrive.
nicbou 6y ago
I would strongly advise against nextcloud. I installed it for about 8 months before giving up. I spent too many nights getting it to work properly, and recovering from various failures. I never felt safe putting my data on it. In my opinion, Nextcloud favours quantity over quality, and many of its core features are subpar. Upgrades are messy, and the docker images fail at reproducible builds. The android client is also buggy.
- KronisLV 6y ago
  I actually recently encountered issues which broke the system, when attempting to upgrade between major versions. I wrote about it briefly on my blog, as incomplete as it may be, here: https://blog.kronis.dev/everything%20is%20broken/nextcloud-is-broken https://blog.kronis.dev/everything%20is%20broken/nextcloud-i... In summary: - Nextcloud failed to update from the version 17 to 20 - it did inform me that it can't do this, but not before attempting to update the version number and essentially breaking itself. That said, other software, such as phpBB is also known for brittle updates between major versions. - After a re-install of the latest version, it failed to allow clients to connect to it through HTTPS (reverse proxy setup), though this proved to be a problem in the default configuration. - It then also failed to synchronize all of my files once i dumped them into the sync folder, though that's a lesser issue. - The new Talk ( https://nextcloud.com/talk/ https://nextcloud.com/talk/ ) application is enabled by default and for some reason noticeably slowed down the whole system, even when not in active use - page loads went from 1-2 seconds to approx. 3-10. Despite all of that, i would still recommend Nextcloud, because there isn't much software like it out there, and when it works, it is actually pretty okay. Provided you follow these suggestions: - Always have working backups. I personally use BackupPC ( https://backuppc.github.io/backuppc/ https://backuppc.github.io/backuppc/ ) which i self-host, cloud vendors also offer managed options. - Stick to a single major version, update manually. In the case of Docker, i just stick to a particular image tag, such as :20.0.2-apache. - When updating, have the backups ready and be prepared to wipe and reinstall the application. Never store anything in Nextcloud that you're not prepared to have unavailable for a while. As for the apps (like Talk or Calendar), where you can't export the data to later import it, be prepared to lose it, or use another alternative. Sadly this will mean that for a while your instance will be insecure, but the current circumstances force me to prefer working software over secure software.
shimonabi 6y ago
I use Nextcloud for the calendar, the to-do deck and to access my Samba shares over HTTPS. That said, I would never put anything important on it. I had at least 5 upgrades in the past 2 years result in total failure, with an unrecoverable instance and corrupted DB.
- opinologo 6y ago
  I'm curious about this. I used Nextcloud for a few years already and never, ever I had a corrupted DB in any of the upgrades.
- PascalW 6y ago
  I've been hosting Nextcloud since version 13 and have upgraded 7 times in total, to version 20 now. Never had a single issue upgrading. I'm hosting via Docker, so upgrading is as simple as pulling and starting a new image. Nextcloud takes care of upgrading tables etc itself and has never failed on me.
  - StavrosK 6y ago
    Same here. Upgrades always went without a hitch. I run it in Compose but the database is on the host (I much prefer that setup in general).
- wazoox 6y ago
  I run several nextcloud instances and never had the slightest trouble upgrading through several Debian versions and many Nextcloud releases.
- cjbconnor 6y ago
  I've also experienced upgrades corrupting my DB a couple times over the years, and once emptying the trash caused DB issues as well.
- nicbou 6y ago
  Less than 1 year and 3 "there goes my evening" issues so far, one which resulted in data loss.
Netcob 6y ago
I've been using Nextcloud for a few years now, starting with my mail-in-a-box instance. Before that, I played around with owncloud a bit over the years. I'm now at the point where I'm trying to find a different solution. I don't even use all the web UI stuff, but desktop sync is unusable to me now. It all started a few months ago when the new desktop client version came out, and would always crash when opening that new view. When it was updated on the server side, I started getting signed out every time I shut down one of the computers I'm using, which gets especially frustrating on the computer where I'm using two nextcloud accounts, because I have to log in, wait 30s because apparently there are bad logins from my IP (??), grant access, log out, log in with the other account, grant access again, and then do the same dance again on the next computer I start. And ever since I've been using it, I kept getting "undefined states" and weird database errors. It just seems like they don't do a lot of testing and focus more on features than stability. Any suggestions for a very stable open source service hosted in linux that does good desktop sync with a windows client?
ajja 6y ago
Here are many negative experiences with Nextcloud at the top of the comments, so I'll share my 2 cents - I started using Nextcloud when it was ownCloud and generally haven't got any issues running a small instance. If my memory serves me well, then at the beginning updates caused a lot of issues, but for past couple of years I'm pretty confident when doing updates. I update only via web UI when new version becomes available for my instance. Currently running v19 though v20 has been released 2 months ago. That way I believe I avoid some of the bugs when major version is released :). Some negatives aspects that I have encountered, but don't see as a big deal - newer Nextcloud versions require newer PHP versions that are not provided by Ubuntu LTS, that means, that I'm no really benefiting from LTS and I have to upgrade the distribution if I want latest Nextcloud (don't want to upgrade PHP separately). and couldn't get Talk working reliably, whatever I'm missing, it feels that documentation could have been better.
TheChaplain 6y ago
NextCloud is awesome, been running my Calendar, Contacts, files and ToDO on it for the last 3 years without any hiccup. At most I spent 10min/month to update to the next version.
francis-io 6y ago
I set up a public facing nextcloud server on my own domain. The login got hammered within days. I took it down and plan to only bring it up behind a wireguard connection. Lesson learnt.
2ion 6y ago
Selfhosting is neat until you really start thinking about durability, reliability, quality, integrity. Never self-host important data with at least doubly redundant backups incl. regular offline backups. On that thought, also never have a single authoritative copy without backup online. If all important photos are on Google Photos with no backup, you're doing it wrong. If you have important data in Onedrive with the convenient sync enabled from multiple PCs and maybe your phone, it's not safe, all these clients have write access. Same for nextcloud. I employ a "spider" system. I use paid online storage like Onedrive, S3, Azureblob or Gdrive, or Fastmail for email and calendar and contacts, but pull all data from their primary hosting location and then disperse it into multiple cloud copies plus local plus distributed local offline (in intervals). All spider copies are encrypted either using GPG or symmetric encryption. I can access all spider target locations with credentials I know by heart or have offline backups of them, and I can also access or know the encryption keys required to access the data itself. I also keep an encrypted emergency copy of my most important data on my phone's storage. In such a system, it's perfectly fine to use Google storage + Azure storage + S3 and whatnot provider, as long as you have a sound system and encrypt your data. They can deliver important features you cannot deliver yourself at reasonable cost. Nothing is free. Essentially, to safeguard the most important personal data, the exact same methods and knowledge that a system engineer who designs a storage layer as part of business critical infrastructure should be applied. Nextcloud is just too messy and complex. I don't want to spent a lot of time managing its lifecycle, testing updates before deploying them to production, etc. I trust accomplished vendors to host production copies of my data as a service, and take responsibility from there. Sure it's easy enough to deploy some piece of open source software and update it continuously, but I suppose the work that goes into making it a high-quality service, like testing updates with duplicate data before letting a new software version lose on your important personal data master copies, is something I doubt few people are putting in.
- aborsy 6y ago
  Would you mind to explain the encryption part? — what software and algorithm do you use? There could be problems with some of these programs. — how do you handle the key management to ensure that you are not locked out of your data? I am not sure if memorization of the secrets is a good approach.
chkaloon 6y ago
"If you choose the cheapest Linode server like I did it doesn't come with much" Storage - the biggest issue with rolling your own cloud. For some reason storage cost is usually the killer in these scenarios.
mashal 6y ago
Wow
mashal 6y ago
Really appreciate

283 points by kmclean 6y ago

someone please help me understand all the hype about nextcloud. I've tried it and found it to be a bloated mess. Why would I want to run this over several smaller apps that do the job better, just without a fancy (if you could call it that) UI to tie it all together

kmclean 6y ago
For me it was just the convenience of being able to have most of my cloud things in one place (like calendar, reminders, contacts, notes, etc). I suspect it's probably not the best solution for each of those individually, and I'm definitely curious what other options are out there, but it's quite a convenient drop-in replacement for a lot of Google's cloud offerings for people who are looking for alternatives. Also I should note I don't actually ever use the nextcloud UI itself, I don't disagree it can feel a bit clunky sometimes. I use 3rd party clients and use my personal cloud to sync everything via webDAV and cardDAV.
kenniskrag 6y ago
less maintanance? Which apps do you use?
indigodaddy 6y ago
It seems to have remained quite popular, so there must be reasons why people like it. Someone else just replied “less maintenance,” but I think a lot of it does have to do with a single webpage/all-in-one portal type application where you can do all the “my things” at. Eg, sandstorm is in that sort of category. It is pretty convenient. Note I have played around with sandstorm but never used next cloud. And sandstorm is very different too, don’t want to get too carried away in comparing them.
- kenniskrag 6y ago
  link: https://sandstorm.io/ https://sandstorm.io/
- mkl 6y ago
  Sandstorm was a neat idea, but unfortunately it seems like it is nearly dead: https://sandstorm.io/news/2019-09-15-shutting-down-oasis https://sandstorm.io/news/2019-09-15-shutting-down-oasis > As much as I love Sandstorm, it’s hard to come home from my successful day job to work on an unsuccessful side project. And so, I have been spending less and less time on Sandstorm. I still push updates every month to keep the dependencies fresh, but hadn’t worked on any new features in about a year and a half before adding mass transfers recently. > Meanwhile, without leadership, the community has mostly disbanded. The only app that gets regular updates anymore is Wekan, thanks to its maintainer Lauri “xet7” Ojansivu. Jake Weisz heroically continues to carry the Sandstorm flag, reviewing app submissions (mostly from Lauri), replying to questions and bug reports, and advocating Sandstorm around the internet. A couple others lurk on the mailing list and IRC. Most people have moved on. > Almost all the app packages are from 2015-2016; many of those apps have had significant updates in their standalone versions since then which are missing on Sandstorm.
  - kentonv 6y ago
    FWIW, this post came after that one, and there has been somewhat more development activity this year compared to last: https://sandstorm.io/news/2020-02-03-reviving-sandstorm https://sandstorm.io/news/2020-02-03-reviving-sandstorm
DarthGhandi 6y ago
Wondering what you use instead? I run nextcloud on a $5 vps just like in this article, it's still underutilised. Out of the box my family can have access to certain folders and their own account, they can watch videos in the browser and I can have a selfhosted google docs/sheets alternative. All encrypted at rest.
JadoJodo 6y ago
Agreed. I used it for about two months and spent dozens of hours trying to help friends/family troubleshoot random glitches the clients had, the unintuitive encryption settings and hugely underwhelming performance that comes with S3-type storage. I loved the idea but it really is a bloated mess and I couldn’t trust it to work when I needed it to.
- canofbars 6y ago
  Tried remote storage and its slow like you mention, but once I ran it on a ryzen desktop with a hdd for storage the whole thing is incredibly fast and works great.
  - indigodaddy 6y ago
    Hmmm, I have a small BuyVM Ryzen-based KVM vm (I think lives on local SSD storage but can’t remember) that’s been idling for quite some time— might have to give it a whirl, thanks.
    - away_throw 6y ago
      Still waiting on a Luxembourg KVM slice to come in stock.
  - acquacow 6y ago
    I use it over gigabit fios and get 68MB/sec transfer speeds to/from my nextcloud instance at home. I don't usually get that much with google drive/etc...
sean_pedersen 6y ago
I concur. I am happy with my lean setup: - SyncThing: decentralized, fast & unix aligned - CryptPad: end-to-end encrypted, real-time collaborative editing
canofbars 6y ago
It just works and does everything. I run it on a ryzen "server" and its super snappy and does everything I need. Its the glue between my apple and linux devices which makes interacting with files between them almost seamless.
bassman9000 6y ago
bloated mess Same. Setting up v20 for a customer these days. Heavy, slow. Buggy LDAP. Not easily containerized: official Docker image tries to rsync ALL the distribution from /usr to /var/www/html every time your start run the container, and you can't mount individual volumes (e.g. just data), because they keep the config at /var/www/html/config.php Customer just wants a UI for a filesystem, and I'd gladly replace it if I could.
j45 6y ago
Low / no maintenance of services and software is huge. The cloud seems maintenance free until the plan or features change or go away altogether.

cameronperot 6y ago

I would suggest Hetzner's storage share (their managed Nextcloud hosting) [1]. Their pricing starts at €2.90/mo for 100GB of storage, which is significantly cheaper than what is mentioned in the post ($5/mo for 25GB). [1] https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share

kmclean 6y ago
Yeah it's actually cheaper (and simpler :) ) to sign up with a nextcloud provider if all you want is a nextcloud account. There are other reasons to run your own instance, but honestly I think most of them come down to the hacker novelty factor. One noteworthy one is having total control over your own data, I guess. Depending on the provider it's not always simple to export all of your data to migrate somewhere else if you ever want to. For folks who would use nextcloud if they didn't have to care about all this server admin stuff I would definitely recommend Hetzner. Cloudamo [1] is also a good option with servers in North America, for people there who care about location. [1] https://cloudamo.com/store/nextcloud https://cloudamo.com/store/nextcloud
mkl 6y ago
That page seems focused on the file storage aspect. Does Storage Share also include other Nextcloud features like calendar?
- stfwn 6y ago
  Yes, I'm also using Hetzner and have not run into any limits in what plugins you can install and use yet. They used to call 'storage share' just 'Nextcloud', but moved it to the new name for licensing reasons. I don't know what type of hardware they're running their Nextcloud instances on, but I've been using calendar/contacts and public file sharing (since Firefox Send went down) on the cheapest plan for a while now and it's fine. I also dabbled a bit in using Nextcloud's maps, video calling, bookmarks and rss reader applications and it all works OK, although I didn't stick to them because they're not the most rich in features. I had to Hetzner email support a few times and got a helpful reply within 1-2 work days, sometimes quicker, which I thought was fine.

jbj 6y ago

one month ago, I set up nextcloud on a rasperry pi with snap. It required very little work to get going, and most services are pretty decent. The only thing in the pack that I didnt like that much was the document editor, where letters appeared in the wrong order when typing too fast. this could possibly be due to running the ARM version of the backbone. But then there are other ways to edit documents, and the rest of the default tools well done. it is also possible to get different plugins as well as there are many apps on f-droid that integrate nicely

josephg 6y ago
> this could possibly be due to running the ARM version of the backbone. As someone who's worked on more than a few collaborative text editors through the years, this just sounds like a correctness bug in how they're processing typing events.
- jamra 6y ago
  It sounds like it to me as well. We had the same bug with content editable fields and changing then index of the selection, which is where the cursor appears.

flatiron 6y ago

I’m a solo person on google enterprise for $20 a month. It sadly cannot be beat. Unlimited storage (almost 40TB) and email is all I care about and it works pretty much flawlessly (besides this weeks outage). I wouldn’t want to have the hassle of running it myself nor the price of storing all that data. So sadly I remain with google.

ipsum2 6y ago
I'm on a similar plan, but I'm worried about the forced upgrade to Google Workspace, which would reduce the amount of storage to 2-5TB per user. I imagine it'll be mandatory soon.
nkrisc 6y ago
> Unlimited storage (almost 40TB) Huh? One of those is finite and the other is not.
- the_svd_doctor 6y ago
  It means he has 40TB stored I guess.
- throwaway201103 6y ago
  40TB is essentially infinite unless you're doing something with large amounts of media content.
- flatiron 6y ago
  i am using 40TB out of unlimited. you are right, that was not clear in my comment
nominated1 6y ago
Not to mention you’re less likely to get hit with ransomware. Nextcloud pwnage seems much more likely.
- j45 6y ago
  Putting anything behind a firewall in combination with a VPN can be relatively turn key and self patching without too much effort. Docker wi5 a tool like proxmox can go a very, very long way in a matter of a few days... and provide near identical vps maintainability. Hardware is much more reliable and self monitoring than it used to be.

centimeter 6y ago

I tried nextcloud for a couple months earlier this year and found it to be overcomplicated poorly engineered junk. It was super unreliable on iPhone. Simple things that should have worked perfectly, like uploading or downloading files, were very unreliable. There’s a certain class of software, usually written these days in a PHP, python, or JS, where there’s a big focus on making it “easy to use” or having a nice UI that usually accomplishes neither and you also have to contend with the underlying software being bad. At this point, the only solution I’ve found to the kind of self-hosting stuff nextcloud provides are various utilities built on top of SSH — like rsync (which works perfectly) - or samba (which works OK). I haven’t found anything that really works well on iOS.

alpaca128 6y ago
I learned the hard way that you should never, ever put huge (as in many files) directories on Nextcloud. In my case a couple Git repos. It worked fine at first but after a while it got really confused, to a point where Nextcloud randomly decided that the older version on the server was actually the more recent one, and synced that folder back onto my local, updated repository. And I was the only person touching those folders, the Nextcloud server was only used as a backup during that period. It's got a couple neat features, but problems like this are really not excusable. When the one core feature breaks in everyday situations for users doing version control it's not a good look.
rixed 6y ago
Very same experience here, except that I ended up with a simple webdav server to share with family and friends. And it was already quite frustrating to realize how few servers are available and how many client applications pretending to support that rather simple protocol were actually not working properly. Tells a lot about how badly selfhosting have fallen out of fashion. I can remember a time when you would get better service when hosting your own file sharing, emails, DNS, VoIP... and plenty of good free software servers for everything to choose from, but it seems not to be the case any more.

mistrial9 6y ago

happy nextcloud admin here - sticking with v18 for now since I have no use for office-calendar things. File sharing links and the video chat working just fine, using it for small team meetings and it works well enough. At some later date, I might look at some of the many, many cloud transfer protocols supported under-the-hood (as seen by looking through the installed php source files).

mastazi 6y ago

Additional note: Nextcloud also comes as part of Mail-in-a-Box (MIAB). If you are using that version of Nextcloud, you need to know the following: 1- It uses SQLite, you can't change this easily as the same SQLite is also accessed by MIAB to sync contacts and calendar functionality. The Nextcloud devs don't recommend SQLite for multi user servers. [1] 2- MIAB supports using Nextcloud for managing contacts and calendar but file management is not officially supported so if you want to use that same installation of Nextcloud for storing your files, you won't get support from the MIAB devs in relation to any issue related to files storage [2] (in that case you will have to seek help from the Nexcloud community). 3- As a result of the 2 points above, for multiuser installations you may want to have a second instance of Nextcloud, backed by Postgres or MariaDB, just for your files storage, while you can keep using the version included in MIAB for contacts and calendar. However, for a single user installation, you would be fine using the version of Nextcloud that comes in MIAB (I have been doing that for a long time and I'm fine, mine is a single-user system). 4- The version of Nextcloud that is included in MIAB by default locks access to the admin interface, this can be unlocked using the provided script [3] 5- The automated backups that MIAB creates, will also include all your Nextcloud flies, not just email, calendar and contacts. So if you have a lot of files it's a good idea to use the S3 backup functionality instead of the default on-disk backup method (otherwise backups files will soon eat up all your storage). In my case I use the MIAB S3 backups feature, and I save my data in Digitalocean Spaces which is S3-compatible [4] [1] https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/stable/admin_manual/configuration_database/db_conversion.html?highlight=convert%20sqlite https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/stable/admin_manual/config... [2] See par. "What’s inside the box?" https://mailinabox.email/ https://mailinabox.email/ [3] https://github.com/mail-in-a-box/mailinabox/blob/master/tools/owncloud-unlockadmin.sh https://github.com/mail-in-a-box/mailinabox/blob/master/tool... [4] https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/spaces/resources/s3-sdk-examples/ https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/spaces/resources/s3-sdk-ex...

bilal4hmed 6y ago

I'm glad some of yall are mentioning cost. These articles while awesome usually don't mention the cost to operate and support such endeavors. I would like to host my own Matrix instance, but I have no idea what the cost would be monthly.

indigodaddy 6y ago
Oracle Cloud has the best Compute/VM Always Free Tier around (2x 1G RAM/50G VMs), which is likely sufficient for a small matrix/synapse server, so realistically you could do it for zero. I don’t know how much network transfer is included in their free tier, however (I’ve looked but never seen it clearly stated anywhere).
- bilal4hmed 6y ago
  thank you so much for this, didnt know they had such a gracious free tier. The only thing I saw was "Outbound Data Transfer: 10 TB per month." but you are absolutely right, it isn't spelt out directly.
  - indigodaddy 6y ago
    Ah ok I think I remember that and I wasn’t sure it that was linked to the LB service or the VMs. Perhaps/likely it’s either/both. In any case, wow 10TB is awesome. I think Google Cloud’s Free Tier transfer limit is 1G, which is one of the reasons I powered it down (the other being they started charging for external IP’s on the free tier compute instances).
  - indigodaddy 6y ago
    Also they have Oracle Linux 8 as an OS option for free tier, so you’re covered if you prefer the EL ecosystem (eg given the current CentOS situation).
- auggierose 6y ago
  So, what, Google is bad now, and Oracle good? Funny world.

newman314 6y ago

Has anyone setup/used multi user calendaring and contacts on NextCloud? Currently considering this vs. a few standalone docker instances for calendars/contacts for one of my downtime projects over the next few weeks...

randoramax 6y ago
Does nextcloud still use caldav/carddav?
- gpanders 6y ago
  Yes
bklaasen 6y ago
Yes, it works well. I moved all my contacts and calendaring from Gmail to a self-hosted Nextcloud instance about two years ago. My wife and I have a calendars in common, both of which are set up as the default calendars on our mobile devices. We recently discussed having a shared address book too. Shouldn't be any trouble to set up. One of us will own it, farm out r/w access to the other, and we'll transfer contacts we ought to have in common piecemeal. CalDAV and CardDAV. In general, Nextcloud has been transformative in allowing us to move off Google products. All our music and photos are on Nextcloud too.
- travelingwave 6y ago
  I've been thinking of switching to my gmail calendar and contacts to nextcloud. But I've been wondering what you then do about contacts you email. Do you somehow keep gmail in sync with the nextcloud contacts?
bityard 6y ago
I have been running OwnCloud/Nextcloud for a very long time. For me, the Calendar is the killer feature. It Just Works. Everyone in the household has an account and we share calendars with each other. You can use whatever client you want (Thunderbird, Android, Apple devices) but the web UI is really excellent and easy to use as well. My biggest gripe with Nextcloud is that upgrading between major versions is a pain and they release upgrades often. If my VPS didn't have other duties as well, I would probably switch to a hosted version.

testxyz 6y ago

Test

buzzerbetrayed 6y ago

The one thing really keeping me from getting off Google is YouTube. For everything else there are good alternatives. But YouTube really is the only viable player in the online video game.

sneak 6y ago
I created a dedicated throwaway gmail account just for YouTube premium, it was the last/only service on Google I was still using. It seems they've killed off all of the working public invidious instances.
duiker101 6y ago
I am still looking for a decent Google Maps alternative. And not about navigation, I never use that, what I care about it's reviews. TripAdvisor is okish when it comes to restaurants but Google just have the advantage of having review for ANYTHING. Still haven't found a competitor that does anything close to that.
- 867-5309 6y ago
  I'm always surprised at the lack of content on OpenStreetMaps, 99 times out of 100 when you click a point of interest there are no photos, reviews, or even a basic description
  - raffraffraff 6y ago
    Yet they still have that restaurant that closed 5 years ago.
kmclean 6y ago
Yeah I still use youtube sometimes, but I do it without an account. You do lose a lot, like remembering what you watched and better recommendations, but you also win some, like Google not remembering what you watched :)
nobody9999 6y ago
>The one thing really keeping me from getting off Google is YouTube. For everything else there are good alternatives. But YouTube really is the only viable player in the online video game. The thing I hate most is ads. And YouTube (unless you pay them) gets ever more aggressive with showing ads. The pre-roll ads are bad enough, but interrupting a playing video with a couple of ads (as happened to me the other day) is way beyond the pale. I guess I need to take a closer look at integrating youtube-dl into my Mythtv environment and otherwise just ignore YT (as I do all of Google's other herding tools).

nr2x 6y ago

I had a few instances of OwnCloud and various NAS setups over the years. Then I had a kid and dumped everything into iCloud when I realized I’d no longer have time to keep it all secure/patched. Time cost of these setups is real.

kmclean 6y ago
Yeah I'm a little worried about the maintenance burden, tbh. I'm not actually a linux/sysadmin type person, but I was pretty keen to achieve my goal of being Google free by 2021 (which I'm happy to announce with this migration that I did :), though I still watch youtube anonymously sometimes). But I'm not sure it'll be the most ideal solution for the long term. I'll see what the maintenance burden actually is like through next year. Some folks have suggested looking at the docker installation options (as opposed to the snap package, which I use here), since it's apparently really easy to maintain. We'll see.
- behringer 6y ago
  I think buying a NAS with all the built in software you need is a more sensible approach for the average enthusiast. But nextcloud is cool too.
- Shared404 6y ago
  One option which is what I've been doing is just using SFTP. I find that that reduces the maintenance burden to just keeping a machine running and patched. I also set up a read-only web frontend with NGINX's directory indexing + htaccess so I can share files easily.
  - rakoo 6y ago
    This is also the direction I'm taking. It makes everything just easier when everything is file-driven, backups are simpler, and when nothing works anymore the basics always work.
  - LinuxBender 6y ago
    A client that works really well with SFTP is lftp. It is in most linux distros and is available for mac in brew and in cygwin for windows. It has a mirror subsystem that works nearly like rsync and can support SFTP + chroot. Combine that with rsnapshot for diffs and you can fall back to earlier versions without using a lot of disk space. You can put that rsnapshot location outside of the SFTP chroot so that malicious access can't wreck your data, or just make the directory above your rsnapshots root-only access so regular users in a non chroot environment can't get there.

gramakri 6y ago

Great to see this article here :-) nextcloud is easily one of the most popular apps on our platform cloudron and it's for selfhosters what wordpress is for web hosters (meaning: a love/hate relationship). Happy to answer any questions on next cloud.

ArchD 6y ago

Nextcloud and owncloud are written in PHP like so are many other web server apps, especially wiki servers. I've always had misgivings about the security of using and running PHP. Does PHP software still tend to be insecure as in the past? Why are there so many web apps (especially wiki servers) written in PHP instead of e.g. Python, Rust or some other language?

ronlobo 6y ago
Yeah it is, don't use it. All the advancements on PHP are great, it's becoming a JAVA more and more, but likely any PHP legacy apps will never see an upgrade to the latest version. And starting a new project in PHP, nah, there are better more well designed programming languages.
ronlobo 6y ago
They even had to come up with their own security scanner (https://scan.nextcloud.com/ https://scan.nextcloud.com/). I assume because they don't even trust their own code mess or cause you can f-up your PHP conf in so many ways that your server becomes vulnerable.
- PZ81JUXJE7uJ 6y ago
  Yeah, only PHP software needs audits and quality testing. /s

acquacow 6y ago

Setup nextcloud 2 years ago as part of a FreeNAS install. It runs in a jail and dumps my files to the local, shared filesystem as a result. I also put the nextcloud clients on my phone so that my photos auto-upload to my NAS vs google photos. It's been quite nice to be able to just drop files to it, right click, then share someone a link to those files.

627467 6y ago
Is this hosted on dynamic IP? How do you handle that so mobile clients can auto-upload to the server?
- johnchristopher 6y ago
  There are two options I think: a VPN or a dynamic DNS like duckdns.
- acquacow 6y ago
  Non-static IP, all done via dns updates. Never had an issue.

homedrive 6y ago

shameless ad: looking for a simpler way to host nextcloud? try homedrive[1] :) [1]: https://homedrive.io https://homedrive.io

yumuzi 6y ago
so no recurring changes for upgrade and maintenance?
- homedrive 6y ago
  no recurring charges (at least for now). the only recurring cost is electricity cost for self-serving at home.
haram_masala 6y ago
This is great! Self-promotion or not, thanks for sharing.

nfriedly 6y ago

Does anybody have a good recommendation for an automated Gmail backup? I am happy using Gmail for now, I just want my own copy of all of my emails that I can search and read - offline if necessary. I tried to use Nextcloud's email app to backup my gmail, but after sending it up I realized that it is just an alternate interface to access email on Google's server, not a proper backup solution. (It only supports IMAP, not POP3.) If I can't find a better solution, I may just set up Thunderbird and put it and POP3 mode, but I'd really prefer something that could sit on a server and run automatically without me having to touch it. (For what it's worth, I ended up keeping my Nextcloud server set up because I found that I really like the notes app. I also have it doing a daily backup of my contacts from my phone and it's replaced Dropbox for small file storage. I already had my photos backing up to a Plex instance on the same server, or else I would probably be using the photo backup feature as well. )

asoplata 6y ago
I recommend using isync (aka mbsync) https://isync.sourceforge.io/ https://isync.sourceforge.io/ to download an offline, IMAP-style copy of your email; it seems to be faster than offlineimap http://www.offlineimap.org/ http://www.offlineimap.org/ which does the same thing. Many people have it run on a simple cron job. You can then use Thunderbird etc. on your full local copy of the mailbox.
- nfriedly 6y ago
  Thank you, I'll try that out!
g_p 6y ago
Getmail is probably your best bet for an automated email backup - that will fetch your email over IMAP (getmail-gmail-xoauth-tokens can use oauth to connect to IMAP) and store it as a maildir or mbox. You can then use that with whatever client or search system you like. You could then use this maildir as the backend for a dovecot IMAP server and use any webmail client of your choosing to connect to this and search it etc. I'd avoid POP3 - very old protocol and it removes your mail from the server (is this your goal?). You're definitely better using IMAP. Even if you want to delete mail from the server, you're probably safer to fetch it by IMAP, then delete it.

busterarm 6y ago

The hardest thing people need to ween themselves off of is email, which I didn't see mentioned here at all. Many people don't think there are viable Gmail alternatives, but on Drew DeVault's recommendation I recently switched myself over to using Migadu[1] and the experience has been fantastic. That said, I am running CalDAV and CardDAV at home on my own hardware, but they do offer a simple version of both that should be usable. [1]:https://migadu.com https://migadu.com

kmclean 6y ago
I use Protonmail (with a custom domain) for email, so I didn't include anything about that here. It's possible to do with Nextcloud, too (and maybe I should look into it now that I have this.. would probably be cheaper), but seems like a bit more work to set up your own mail server. Several people have recommended mailinabox to me.
thombles 6y ago
Take care with Migadu if you use mailing lists. I troubleshooted some issues with bounces earlier this year and both users in question were using Migadu - they had ended up with the unusually strict "p=reject" DMARC policy. Every time they sent an email to the list I was on, my account would (correctly) trigger a bounce and after several of these incidents _my_ subscription would be removed from the mailing list for too many bounces. I'm not even sure whose fault this situation is, but it's something to keep in mind.

docsaintly 6y ago

I recommend NethServer or YunoHost which can install nextcloud as a module, along with many other services, and can be easily updated with security patches. Freedombox may become a contender some day too. Its one thing to set it up, and it's another thing to keep it running stable and secure.

markshepard 6y ago

FileCloud Community Edition (https://www.getfilecloud.com/filecloud-community-edition/ https://www.getfilecloud.com/filecloud-community-edition/) is another viable option for self-hosted file sync and sharing. It runs on top of windows and linux. The installation takes just couple of seconds

2Gkashmiri 6y ago

Can any nextcloud user suggest why to use nextcloud instead of a network drive for a small office where everything is done offline and within LAN ? Mapped network drive is painlessly easy. Open file manager, click any file and you are there. There isnt much for "collaboration" when you can just talk face to face. I really want to use nextcloud for managing files but I could not find a satisfactory answer. Oh, I have a daily file backup meaning I can get any copy of a file from last year so that is covered.

KingOfCoders 6y ago
I've used FreeNas for some years in out startup and now NextCloud for some years at home. FreeNas feels much more stable. If you only work in an office I'd use network drives they are less hassle than syncing (though mixed environments with osx and smb are a pain) If you need the files with you, use NextCloud.
- 2Gkashmiri 6y ago
  Oh.. yeah. A bunch of laptops have Linux on them and it gets tiring sometimes to having to overwrite each file when saving. Though fuse is supposed to fix that on plasma at least. I kinda havent switched because of that reason only. I dont need data outside of the lan network and for outside I use zerotier so I always have that network drive. Good to have options. Maybe one day I might switch everyone but that would be a lot of trouble
  - KingOfCoders 6y ago
    +1 for zerotier - I use NextCloud over zerotier.

Daegalus 6y ago

I really tried to like Nextcloud. I set it up multiple times. And it was a giant cluttered mess of a UI, things worked poorly, and as much as I want to be ok with a PHP app, I don't trust PHP. And its not because I want it to be JS web app or anything like that. Just the core HTML/CSS is poorly implemented and just doesn't look good. The calendar and addons system just work so poorly. I just cant use it. I just use Seafile for filesharing. I've run my own email before, also a pain in the ass for spam management. I do own my own domain and use ImprovMX.com to forward it to a free Gmail account. So if I ever need move, I can do it quickly and easily by just changing the forward. I'm not privacy conscious so I don't really care to run from Google for that reason, I just am tired of them shutting down and killing services I use often. I just haven't hit an email service that matches the spam fighting powers of Google yet. or the UI. Everything else looks so traditional. and I don't want to pay $99 for Hey, mostly only do month to month so I can easily cancel and not waste money if I want to stop using it. Anyways, I digress. I just haven't found the right combination of tools for me, but Nextcloud was not it. I honestly think its horribly designed. We need an alternative to it, but I know its a huge undertaking to make something like this, so I am not sure it will happen any time soon.

antman 6y ago

Ok I have the nextcloud setup, now how can I backup my iphone gallery? Haven't found a frictionless way to do that except icloud.

kmclean 6y ago
There's an iOS app you can configure to automatically upload your photos to your nextcloud so they're available from anywhere (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/nextcloud/id1125420102 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/nextcloud/id1125420102). You might want to set up Backblaze or similar for external storage, though, if you're using a small VPS you might fill up the storage pretty quickly.

KingOfCoders 6y ago

I use NextCloud for some years now. I hate the syncing which destroyed several files. Another problem is files that need to go together like git source directories e.g NextCloud easily screws that up, my with "lost" the text of her novel if we didn't had backups. Their technology is miles behind OneDrive/Dropbox and they seam to not care but add features that enable them to attract new customers instead of fixing the core. When you need to use Office products nothing beats OneDrive.

nicbou 6y ago

I would strongly advise against nextcloud. I installed it for about 8 months before giving up. I spent too many nights getting it to work properly, and recovering from various failures. I never felt safe putting my data on it. In my opinion, Nextcloud favours quantity over quality, and many of its core features are subpar. Upgrades are messy, and the docker images fail at reproducible builds. The android client is also buggy.

KronisLV 6y ago
I actually recently encountered issues which broke the system, when attempting to upgrade between major versions. I wrote about it briefly on my blog, as incomplete as it may be, here: https://blog.kronis.dev/everything%20is%20broken/nextcloud-is-broken https://blog.kronis.dev/everything%20is%20broken/nextcloud-i... In summary: - Nextcloud failed to update from the version 17 to 20 - it did inform me that it can't do this, but not before attempting to update the version number and essentially breaking itself. That said, other software, such as phpBB is also known for brittle updates between major versions. - After a re-install of the latest version, it failed to allow clients to connect to it through HTTPS (reverse proxy setup), though this proved to be a problem in the default configuration. - It then also failed to synchronize all of my files once i dumped them into the sync folder, though that's a lesser issue. - The new Talk ( https://nextcloud.com/talk/ https://nextcloud.com/talk/ ) application is enabled by default and for some reason noticeably slowed down the whole system, even when not in active use - page loads went from 1-2 seconds to approx. 3-10. Despite all of that, i would still recommend Nextcloud, because there isn't much software like it out there, and when it works, it is actually pretty okay. Provided you follow these suggestions: - Always have working backups. I personally use BackupPC ( https://backuppc.github.io/backuppc/ https://backuppc.github.io/backuppc/ ) which i self-host, cloud vendors also offer managed options. - Stick to a single major version, update manually. In the case of Docker, i just stick to a particular image tag, such as :20.0.2-apache. - When updating, have the backups ready and be prepared to wipe and reinstall the application. Never store anything in Nextcloud that you're not prepared to have unavailable for a while. As for the apps (like Talk or Calendar), where you can't export the data to later import it, be prepared to lose it, or use another alternative. Sadly this will mean that for a while your instance will be insecure, but the current circumstances force me to prefer working software over secure software.

shimonabi 6y ago

I use Nextcloud for the calendar, the to-do deck and to access my Samba shares over HTTPS. That said, I would never put anything important on it. I had at least 5 upgrades in the past 2 years result in total failure, with an unrecoverable instance and corrupted DB.

opinologo 6y ago
I'm curious about this. I used Nextcloud for a few years already and never, ever I had a corrupted DB in any of the upgrades.
PascalW 6y ago
I've been hosting Nextcloud since version 13 and have upgraded 7 times in total, to version 20 now. Never had a single issue upgrading. I'm hosting via Docker, so upgrading is as simple as pulling and starting a new image. Nextcloud takes care of upgrading tables etc itself and has never failed on me.
- StavrosK 6y ago
  Same here. Upgrades always went without a hitch. I run it in Compose but the database is on the host (I much prefer that setup in general).
wazoox 6y ago
I run several nextcloud instances and never had the slightest trouble upgrading through several Debian versions and many Nextcloud releases.
cjbconnor 6y ago
I've also experienced upgrades corrupting my DB a couple times over the years, and once emptying the trash caused DB issues as well.
nicbou 6y ago
Less than 1 year and 3 "there goes my evening" issues so far, one which resulted in data loss.

Netcob 6y ago

I've been using Nextcloud for a few years now, starting with my mail-in-a-box instance. Before that, I played around with owncloud a bit over the years. I'm now at the point where I'm trying to find a different solution. I don't even use all the web UI stuff, but desktop sync is unusable to me now. It all started a few months ago when the new desktop client version came out, and would always crash when opening that new view. When it was updated on the server side, I started getting signed out every time I shut down one of the computers I'm using, which gets especially frustrating on the computer where I'm using two nextcloud accounts, because I have to log in, wait 30s because apparently there are bad logins from my IP (??), grant access, log out, log in with the other account, grant access again, and then do the same dance again on the next computer I start. And ever since I've been using it, I kept getting "undefined states" and weird database errors. It just seems like they don't do a lot of testing and focus more on features than stability. Any suggestions for a very stable open source service hosted in linux that does good desktop sync with a windows client?

ajja 6y ago

Here are many negative experiences with Nextcloud at the top of the comments, so I'll share my 2 cents - I started using Nextcloud when it was ownCloud and generally haven't got any issues running a small instance. If my memory serves me well, then at the beginning updates caused a lot of issues, but for past couple of years I'm pretty confident when doing updates. I update only via web UI when new version becomes available for my instance. Currently running v19 though v20 has been released 2 months ago. That way I believe I avoid some of the bugs when major version is released :). Some negatives aspects that I have encountered, but don't see as a big deal - newer Nextcloud versions require newer PHP versions that are not provided by Ubuntu LTS, that means, that I'm no really benefiting from LTS and I have to upgrade the distribution if I want latest Nextcloud (don't want to upgrade PHP separately). and couldn't get Talk working reliably, whatever I'm missing, it feels that documentation could have been better.

TheChaplain 6y ago

NextCloud is awesome, been running my Calendar, Contacts, files and ToDO on it for the last 3 years without any hiccup. At most I spent 10min/month to update to the next version.

francis-io 6y ago

I set up a public facing nextcloud server on my own domain. The login got hammered within days. I took it down and plan to only bring it up behind a wireguard connection. Lesson learnt.

2ion 6y ago

Selfhosting is neat until you really start thinking about durability, reliability, quality, integrity. Never self-host important data with at least doubly redundant backups incl. regular offline backups. On that thought, also never have a single authoritative copy without backup online. If all important photos are on Google Photos with no backup, you're doing it wrong. If you have important data in Onedrive with the convenient sync enabled from multiple PCs and maybe your phone, it's not safe, all these clients have write access. Same for nextcloud. I employ a "spider" system. I use paid online storage like Onedrive, S3, Azureblob or Gdrive, or Fastmail for email and calendar and contacts, but pull all data from their primary hosting location and then disperse it into multiple cloud copies plus local plus distributed local offline (in intervals). All spider copies are encrypted either using GPG or symmetric encryption. I can access all spider target locations with credentials I know by heart or have offline backups of them, and I can also access or know the encryption keys required to access the data itself. I also keep an encrypted emergency copy of my most important data on my phone's storage. In such a system, it's perfectly fine to use Google storage + Azure storage + S3 and whatnot provider, as long as you have a sound system and encrypt your data. They can deliver important features you cannot deliver yourself at reasonable cost. Nothing is free. Essentially, to safeguard the most important personal data, the exact same methods and knowledge that a system engineer who designs a storage layer as part of business critical infrastructure should be applied. Nextcloud is just too messy and complex. I don't want to spent a lot of time managing its lifecycle, testing updates before deploying them to production, etc. I trust accomplished vendors to host production copies of my data as a service, and take responsibility from there. Sure it's easy enough to deploy some piece of open source software and update it continuously, but I suppose the work that goes into making it a high-quality service, like testing updates with duplicate data before letting a new software version lose on your important personal data master copies, is something I doubt few people are putting in.

aborsy 6y ago
Would you mind to explain the encryption part? — what software and algorithm do you use? There could be problems with some of these programs. — how do you handle the key management to ensure that you are not locked out of your data? I am not sure if memorization of the secrets is a good approach.

chkaloon 6y ago

"If you choose the cheapest Linode server like I did it doesn't come with much" Storage - the biggest issue with rolling your own cloud. For some reason storage cost is usually the killer in these scenarios.

mashal 6y ago

Wow

mashal 6y ago

Really appreciate