17 ms·

Migrating 1 terabyte of files from OneDrive to Nextcloud

122 points by herrherrmann 4y ago

JZL003 4y ago
What about backblaze b2 with rclone, I'm sure there's a front end somewhere and with the clousflare cdn it's no egress cost. Or clousflares storage amounts
- mickael-kerjean 4y ago
  I've made one such frontend for not only backblaze but also Nextcloud (via webdav), and pretty much every protocol like FTP, SFTP, S3, ... It's all open source: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash
- azalemeth 4y ago
  The trouble is that backblaze is actually quite expensive for home offerings. When I looked a few months ago, the cheapest provider (per TB) by far was actually mega.nz, and they offer a platform with no upper storage cap (if you pay for it). Works with rclone, e2ee, and some other "side benefits" too. No idea what the native clients are like, however.
  - dachryn 4y ago
    the big issue with Mega is always how sustainable they are. Its a business with a questionable legacy, and I have no idea what the longevity is of the service. Your data is probably fine, but it attracts a certain clientele that might put the service at risk long term of another seizure or whatever. I also use Mega for big files, but not as my primary backup solution or anything important.
gurchik 4y ago
I was looking into how I could set up Hetzner Storage Box as a storage device for Nextcloud. Somehow I didn’t even realize that Hetzner offers their own hosted Nextcloud instances (Storage Share).
- iansinnott 4y ago
  Yeah, it seems to be not well advertised. Have been running one for a few months now and so far it's excellent as a Dropbox replacement, mobile app and all.
  - aborsy 4y ago
    How is one company replacement for another company? Both have access to data.
    - EnKopVand 4y ago
      It doesn't exactly save your privacy and it won't matter to everyone, but Hetzner is European.
- fundatus 4y ago
  In case you still want to build it yourself: you can use sshfs to mount a Storage box on your Hetzner server instance.
vachina 4y ago
> On top of that, I became very busy with managing software, installing updates, configuring the network access Ironically using a Windows as a NAS is easier because everything is point and click, reducing cognitive load. You can also afford to be on a slower update schedule if you stick the application behind a NAT and proxy, which blocks 99% of drive-by attacks (because the attacker don’t even know where to look).
- herrherrmann 4y ago
  Interesting to hear that Windows would simplify some things! Upon reflecting about my time with the Synology NAS, I remembered that there was mostly the network setup I struggled with (DynDNS, port forwarding, static IP address, remote vs. local network access, etc.) – I guess this wouldn’t have been much easier on Windows either, I suppose?
iansinnott 4y ago
Nextcloud on Hetzner has been great in my experience. Running for a few months now as a Dropbox replacement and very happy. Mobile app, mac app, it all seems to work exactly as expected. My only gripe is that they do not allow Nextcloud external storage[0] but that's understandable given what they're selling. [0]: https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/admin_manual/configuration_files/external_storage_configuration_gui.html https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/admin_manual/config...
- Duralias 4y ago
  https://docs.hetzner.com/konsoleh/storage-share/configuration/external-storage https://docs.hetzner.com/konsoleh/storage-share/configuratio... Seems like they do now, you just have to turn it on manually.
  - iansinnott 4y ago
    Thanks! had not seen this yet.
- herrherrmann 4y ago
  Good to hear that you haven’t run into any issues for a few months, at least! Some peeps warned me that Nextcloud is also quite buggy, but I didn’t run into any issues yet myself.
alvarezbjm-hn 4y ago
Why didn't you stay with pcloud, again? You mentioned encryption was uncomfortable, but in the end you selected nextcloud which doesn't have reliable encryption. *I am a pcloud user since 5 years ago
- tmikaeld 4y ago
  I’ve used pcloud for 7 years, it’s been very stable and i even use it for backups (700GB daily). It’s the only solution I’ve been able to send at consistent 1Gbps speeds to (except when it’s many tiny files). About encryption, you unlock it once per restart and it stays open. It’s not like you have to enter password every time you move a file.. (For the backups i use rClone with encryption)
  - presto8 4y ago
    Same here, happy pCloud user (unlimited plan) for 2 years now. I didn't get the encryption, but it goes on sale from time to time for $75 lifetime. I encrypt all my files locally before sending so the encryption doesn't matter for me. I use rclone with --transfers 32 (for smaller files) and it seems to work fine without throttling.
- herrherrmann 4y ago
  You’re right, pCloud is not a bad alternative! I remember being annoyed by the password prompt for the encryption feature, but another user here wrote that they only need it once after every restart, which seems fine to me now. Back when I tried it for the first time (2 years ago) I decided against it because the OneDrive migration was not fully working (many files were skipped and it wasn’t transparent which ones or what was the reason), and the support couldn’t help me figure out any viable solution to migrate all my files. Nowadays with the NAS the migration would have been easier, I suppose.
bfung 4y ago
iCloud+ 2TB: 9.99 € does the macOS and iOS backup. Click buy and pretty much done. Also have my parents data backed up with family sharing, I don’t have to be family IT support! If you have other devices… Tim Cook recommends replacing those with Apple devices /sarcasm Only requirement not met is not having a plan that supports more than 2T. Yes, Apple owns my life. But happy about it for now, good value.
- SXX 4y ago
  If only iCloud had E2E encryption ...
  - sdze 4y ago
    This!!! I always laugh when Apple advertises its supposedly superior privacy features... For sensitive stuff I placed a encrypted sparsebundle on my iCloud drive.
- piskerpan 4y ago
  iCloud is good stuff, at least for ease of use. I use it to store my photos and passwords. Photos are then automatically synced to my Mac, which is then backed up to Time Machine. Same goes for the iCloud Keychain. You could say I’m 100% on Apple working decently, but with 3 copies I feel relatively safe. I wish there was a third party tool to occasionally verify the whole library to ensure photos don’t rot or just disappear.
- throwaway0x7E6 4y ago
  >good value one terabyte of HDD space ≈ $12
  - rejectfinite 4y ago
    But an external HDD is not going to sync to a central server or other devices. icloud/onedrive etc is not just the space but also redundancy and backup and sync bultiin.
    - 4y ago
vxNsr 4y ago
Aside from Dropbox do any of the mentioned providers offer auto save functionality for docs and spreadsheets? For me that’s really the killer feature (that and the fact that I paid $100 for 7 years of service using MS’s employee discount offering for everyone during the pandemic). Every time people talk about self hosting or using a different cloud provider my biggest concern is auto save. And I haven’t heard anyone address it.
- Nux 4y ago
  When you save a document (ie ctrl+s) Nextcloud detects it and uploads the new version. It can even do some versioning.
  - rejectfinite 4y ago
    Clicking ctrl+s is not autosave :) That is saving manually, and then the file gets synced. Autosave you don't need to click save/ctrl+s https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/what-is-autosave-6d6bd723-ebfd-4e40-b5f6-ae6e8088f7a5 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/what-is-autosave-... >AutoSave is a new feature available in Excel, Word, and PowerPoint for Microsoft 365 subscribers that saves your file automatically, every few seconds, as you work.
    - ilyt 4y ago
      If you use app with auto-save it will auto-sync. Many apps have that feature.
    - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
      It's been around since Office 95.
    - weberer 4y ago
      That's a feature of your editor, not the cloud sync tool. If you're editing a file in Vim, for example, called work/foo.txt, then it will create a hidden file called work/.foo.txt.swp and periodically autosave to that file. And if you have Nextcloud set to sync the work folder, then it will automatically back up .foo.txt.swp as well. https://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/recover.html#swap-file https://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/recover.html#swap-fil...
kornhole 4y ago
If comparing on costs, hosting it on home HW is by far the best way to go. I run Rsync and keep the backup in my shed so it is off-site. Nextcloud provides way more than data backups. It is best in class for personal internet services. My family and friends use my server for syncing their contacts, calendars, tasks, kanban, music, RSS, bookmarks, passwords, notes, and finances to all their devices. Ours is also setup with Talk for voice and video conferencing, polls, forms, phone tracking, CMS, mail, maps, activity pub social media, and there are a ton of other possible apps. It is perfect solution to avoid Goopple.
- tmikaeld 4y ago
  Why is home HW the best option? You'd have to: - Purchase the hardware & replace if it breaks - Install the software & keep it updated - Pay for electricity 3.2€, that the Hetzner 1TB storage box costs, would be cheaper than the current EU electricity cost alone.
  - pjc50 4y ago
    > 3.2€, that the Hetzner 1TB storage box costs That looks like a really great deal.
  - piaste 4y ago
    Presumably you'd be using your regular PC to host Nextcloud. You are correct that you'll spend more in electricity than a Hetzner sub costs, of course. (The 1TB tier costs 5.11€ now btw.) However, Hetzner storage isn't encrypted (AFAIK) so I would _never_ put my personal files in there. I pay the extra cost gladly. There's lots of alternatives, of course - right now Icedrive is the one that I find most interesting, as it has similar prices to Hetzner, provides nextcloud-ish features and is E2E encrypted. I still need to look into how trustworthy they are though.
  - Semaphor 4y ago
    > 3.2€, that the Hetzner 1TB storage box costs, would be cheaper than the current EU electricity cost alone. 4.29€ in Germany. And I’d need a server that constsntly consumes 14.5W to make Hetzner cheaper, that’s 3-5 times what my homeserver averages.
teo_zero 4y ago
So this article is about looking for a perfect solution, not finding it, and finally compromising on some of them, like end-to-end encryption, ease of migration...?
socialismisok 4y ago
Is that a lot? That seems like very little data.
- shapefrog 4y ago
  I assume this is the test run and they will move the rest over later or something?
neamar 4y ago
My experience with Nextcloud was underwhelming. Regular crashes, very slow sync if you have thousands of files, full reupload on any change and ignored files that do not get synced with no warnings. I had made five accounts for my family and each of them got a separate blocking bug. The worst part was the syncing of shared folders. I ended up using Seafile, which is mostly open source and has beek rock solid for the past two years. I'm not looking back!
- preya2k 4y ago
  This! He says OneDrive is buggy, but that’s nothing compared to Nextcloud. He’s in for a big disappointment. Seafile is a much better choice if you’re only looking for FileSync (without the whole App Store thing). Another new and already better and faster contender: ownCloud OCIS, which is a complete Go rewrite of ownCloud and is already very fast and efficient and works like a charm for file sharing.
  - piaste 4y ago
    One thing that made me shy away from Seafile was the limitations of its Android client. IIRC it could only upload photos, not sync folders. So couldn't use it for notes, voice recordings, downloads, books... I considered Syncthing as well, but I wanted both the arbitrary file sync and the web-based features. Figured I'd rather deal with Nextcloud's poor performance than cobble together a crappy Nextcloud clone via three separate apps. I'm definitely keeping an eye out for OCIS though.
    - Semaphor 4y ago
      Pretty much exactly the same position. I use NC for file-syncing, WebDAV, and the webinterface for those files only, but it’s not exactly great. But for similar reasons as you, it’s still the solution I’m stuck with for now.
    - ilyt 4y ago
      Syncthing works well for me (I use it also on Android to sync photos and notes) but yeah, if you want web access that's not the right tool for the job
pizza234 4y ago
Owncloud/Nextcloud... beware. It's significantly worse than the other services. I've tried really hard to make it work (including self-hosting), but it's just poor software, for a few reasons. Worst problem, which I haven't experienced with the other services, is that if there is a connection problem (this may happen routinely, if servers have scheduled downtime), files may go out of sync. Result is that, ridiculously, one may get conflicts even if they're using a single client in total. There was an issue opened, which has been ignored and autoclosed for a while. Second, lack of centralization causes a bit of a mess. One never knows which version the servers ship (although one may not care); hosts may be less realiable, and finally, hosts may change frequently (I've see a few changes in the list of free servers) so one is never sure how long the service will be offered. Also, the configuration shipped with the Nginx version was not great. Overall, I think that the software "isn't great", and I don't trust it for personal data.
- ilyt 4y ago
  It wins by amount of features but yes, software craftsmanship is generally shit. Hell, I managed to kill our corporate server by navigating to settings page. How ? Browser auto-filled fields JS auto-submitted that as changes. Didn't verify them working before submission either. What browser (for some fucking reason, I didn't click any confirmation) remembered in LDAP settings was no longer a correct config so it auto-broke any time I navigated into settings page.
leipert 4y ago
Personally, I really love Syncthing https://syncthing.net/ https://syncthing.net/, if you do not need an iOS client. I have it set up on all my families windows machines, my personal machines and between two NAS. One of the NAS does nightly backups to backblaze.
- bayindirh 4y ago
  For using Syncthing on iOS, there's Moebius sync, which encapsulates the syncthing client as a one-time paid application. Works pretty flawless.
  - Hard_Space 4y ago
    Agreed, though you do have to export your photos and videos to another folder before you can sync them. I do that weekly.
thejosh 4y ago
I backup (encrypted) to multiple places, including to Google Drive using a Turkish billing account on another google account. 2tb works out to about $30USD per year. In terms of actual computer backups, thanks to btrfs+btrbk I can incremental backup every hour over LAN to my server and also to my attached USB drive. With compression/snapshots this is pretty small.
- gzer0 4y ago
  Thanks for the tip about the Turkish 2tb for $30/yr. Very good deal. Just did this. :)
  - thejosh 4y ago
    Just be careful, I haven't heard of account locks, but I'm sure it can happen. I just use it for cheap storage. You could add your other account onto it as a family plan, so Account A (main) can share Account B's (Turkish account) storage. But given Googles track record for support... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
mandis 4y ago
I have used a couple of OneDrive family accounts to host some media files that I wanted to preserve (yt video downloads, academic courses and papers collected from questionable soruces). What are the chances MS blocks access to my data in the next 1 year?
rand49an 4y ago
It might be worth trying the Insync client instead of the official OneDrive one as I've found that quite slow to sync large libraries. It's far more customisable and runs on Linux too. https://www.insynchq.com/ https://www.insynchq.com/
rbut 4y ago
Our business migrated from OneDrive for business to a self-hosted Seafile [1] setup (we run it in a docker). Seafile has a syncing client, and a drive client (Seadrive) for viewing files as if it was a shared drive. Since moving to Seadrive I have not had a single support issue, nor heard of a single issue syncing, whereas I'd have them weekly with OneDrive to the point we'd have to delete their local files and re-setup OneDrive from scratch. OneDrive truly is an abomination built on top of archaic Sharepoint. [1] https://www.seafile.com/en/home/ https://www.seafile.com/en/home/
- tacker2000 4y ago
  Ive been using seafile for over 5 yrs in my business and it has so far worked flawlessly! There are only very rare hiccups with binary files such as excel sheets or PSD files, where seafile will create a “SFConflict” file. Havent figured out how to fix that het.
- shellac 4y ago
  > OneDrive truly is an abomination built on top of archaic Sharepoint. OneDrive _for business_ is built on Sharepoint. Onedrive ... erm ... not for business (?) is an entirely separate product, and they don't interoperate. Which is another baffling decision by Microsoft branding, since for regular users they make no distinction. It only becomes apparent when you discover you can't work with people outside the organisation.
  - rejectfinite 4y ago
    >It only becomes apparent when you discover you can't work with people outside the organisation. You can share externally with Onedrive for business... It's a setting in Sharepoint admin... Once again, people here have no idea that most of their complaints with O365 is how management sets the security policy... not the platform itself... https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/turn-external-sharing-on-or-off https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/turn-external-s... :) You are right in that it used to be bad. Groove.exe... The old Onedrive for business client was a horror
clnq 4y ago
I think the author misrepresented the NAS option a bit. I have the same Sinology DS220j and from my experience, you definitely do not need to constantly install/manage software, configure network access and renew certificates. Yes, these tasks pop up every now and then, but I don't think you can say you're "very busy" with something that takes 1 hour/year. There are also significant benefits of running your own NAS - no big tech company has your documents, and they can't lock you out on a whim (such as if your Google or Microsoft account gets suspended for sometimes unfair reasons). The access speed is much higher with the data on LAN, and therefore there's little need to keep the data duplicated on your machine. And you have offline access. Security options are generally better than with most cloud providers - you can configure the firewall to deny access to anyone but whitelisted IPs, or do the many other things you can do if you own your firewall. Finally, it's not true to say that all of your files would be gone on a NAS if something happened to the server. This goes back to the saying about data copies "two is one and one is none". You can set up backups to another NAS overnight, or use one of the cheap cloud storage services not meant for random access like Backblaze B2. Of course, the NAS itself is vulnerable physically - if it gets caught in a fire, stolen, or flooded for example.
- herrherrmann 4y ago
  Hey, author here! I agree that objectively, it’s not much work to maintain the Synology NAS once everything is correctly set up. But I personally just got tired after attempting to configure the network access alone for the nth time. My goal was to make the NAS accessible remotely (i.e. from outside my home network) and I felt like that was already a big task (comparing different DynDNS providers, port forwarding, asking my internet provider for a static IP address). And the recurring tasks (mostly renewing certificates for the , as far as I remember) would annoy me every year or so. And I agree with the advantages you listed about a NAS setup! That’s why I tried one out, after all. I did run into some scary security situations (once the DynDNS was set up, someone was immediately trying to log in via brute force), but nothing too major, fortunately. And I never got the network setup right (e.g. to use the local network speed when I’m home and still access my files the same way when I’m away via the internet). So, these were only theoretical advantages that I could never really get to myself (I’m sure other people figured it out, but I didn’t exactly find good documentation on these things online either). And regarding your last point, I also generally agree! Although it feels silly to me to have a NAS at home and then still do regular backups via another storage/backup service elsewhere. I wouldn’t want to back up 1+ TB of files every day or even week, although there might be diffing solutions for that. Anyway, I hope this answer makes it clearer why I decided against a (Synology) NAS in the end. I’m sure other peeps figured it out and are happy with their Synology setup, but for my purposes I’ve never really gotten there.
ilyt 4y ago
I used syncthing[1] for that althought use case is a bit different - syncthing is mostly to sync the data between many devices (p2p) without option to have partial sync on a directory; you can have more than one synced directories but "one big directory" will be "one big directory" on every machine. So I have my phone pics synced to my NAS and PC, my blog's markdown files between server and my computers, another dir for some music etc. There is also option for simple versioning in case you need to dig out the old files but it's not integrated with OS as it is "just a directory". Disadvantages is that you need at least one other device running to sync as it is P2P (with some community-ran server to forward if you're NATed out of sight) but other than that, literally zero problems. [1] https://syncthing.net/ https://syncthing.net/
- solstice 4y ago
  > no partial sync That's not really true. You can specify which files you don't want synced. So, on my phone i can say "don't send me files that match the following pattern" https://docs.syncthing.net/users/ignoring.html https://docs.syncthing.net/users/ignoring.html So in your example you could make a subfolder "big files" and exclude that subfolder from being synchronized to your mobile device. I also love syncthing. I've got it set up to transfer my phone's pictures to my PC where I regularly sort through them and weed them out. And I've got a shared folder that's replicated across all my devices that contains my Obsidian vault, my KeePass file and other useful things
prmph 4y ago
I once lost some important files stored on OneDrive. These were pretty marge media files. There were downloaded as a zip file, apparently successfully. Then, I deleted those files from OneDrive. Imagine my surprise some time later when I went to access those files. Upon expanding the zip file, I saw that the media files in question had been replaced by some text files, with their content indicating that the download of those media files failed, and instructing me to try to download them again. What the heck, so I could download a thousand files, which realistically I can't go through one-by-one to check if any have been replaced by a text file, and OndeDrive does not alert me to the fact that some files could not be downloaded. I already had issues with the slowness and clunkiness of OneDrive, but this was the last straw. I'm migrating all my data from there.
- chii 4y ago
  > the media files in question had been replaced by some text files this is why a download program should verify with a hash (which should be embedded into the name of the file, or some kind of tracking metadata).
- sebazzz 4y ago
  Since Microsoft has been outsourcing development and QA for some of their consumer products quality has gone downhill. The picture browser is barely usable. Keeps scrolling back to the top. The iOS file provider sometimes doesn't respond. Downloading 500 photos locally on an iPad results in a unresponding app.
- nh2 4y ago
  I can confirm this 100%. We have multiple customers that send us data via OneDrive, and for all of them multi-file downloads do not work. Microsoft's ZIP-Streamer to download multiple files simply does not work. The text files contain exceptions with contents such as: PK^C^D^T^@^H^H^@^@<80>L^PS^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@9^@^@^@__myfile.png_Error.txtThis file cannot be downloaded. ExceptionType: ZipMeTAException. CorrelationId: 08132d8f-77b7-4c75-a66b-345e8a15c340, UTC DateTime: 8/16/2021 9:36:53 AMPK^G^H<FB>%Mw<A4>^@^@^@<A4>^@^@^@PK^C^D^T^@^H^H^@^@<80>L^PS^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@-^@^@^@myfile.png<89>PNG This is nondeterministic per file, so you have to either manually click every single file in a folder to download everything to avoid ZIP streaming (you apparently cannot use any API to download files that were just shared via link and no other auth), or repeatedly "download the ZIP to convergence" -- which is exactly as silly as it sounds.
Octabrain 4y ago
Not relate with the post but a rant against OneDrive a couple of weeks ago came to my mind: My partner uses Windows 11. She works and also studies in college. In both places they use Office360 so, she has her laptop set up with her Microsoft accounts and switches between college one and work when needs it. The other day, she came for help asking why the college OneDrive was getting full when she only has documents. Turns out that the fucking OneDrive decided to synchronize the whole user personal folder (where she has very personal stuff) into the college's OneDrive. Surprisingly, disabling such a wrong behavior was not straight forward as I expected. Microsoft has managed to make it ambiguous enough for having to spend a fair amount of time on such a simple thing. I don't know it's just another example of them trying to shovel down your throat their cloud services or just some obscure plan to simply have access to all your very personal data (or both).
- pixel16 4y ago
  This sounds like College IT is using Known folder redirection to have files backed up seamlessly to Onedrive. Source: Msft Employee
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - Octabrain 4y ago
    So, you are telling me that my girlfriend's college IT department, has the capability, through Office 360, of manipulating which folders to backup on the clients side? Man, I really hope it's Friday and my brain is exhausted and not getting what you said straight, otherwise, this weekend is gonna be a session of urgent OneDrive removal and Linux indoctrination for her.
    - p12tic 4y ago
      Seems like that's true: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/redirect-known-folders https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/redirect-known-...
    - 4y ago
Jamie9912 4y ago
I'm thinking of moving off Dropbox. The 2TB plan pricing is quite fair, their sync client is far superior to competitors in terms of speed, efficiency and correctness.. but their plans above 2TB are just not worth the money to me (it gets more expensive per GB)
dspillett 4y ago
> if anything happened to my trusty server, all my files would potentially be gone This is what a good backup solution is for. While Hetzner's product and other hosted NextCloud instances come with some protection baked in I would still strongly suggest an off-service backup rather than keeping all your eggs in one basket. (I'm assuming here that NextCloud is being used as the primary storage, rather than a backup location for other storage, if everything else is elsewhere already then the need for an extra full backup solution is reduced)
- herrherrmann 4y ago
  Interesting! So, you’d still back up your full cloud storage elsewhere (Backblaze has been mentioned by other users), even though your cloud storage provider does backups themselves (e.g. Hetzner claims to do several backups every day)?
  - dspillett 4y ago
    Not full, but anything that is not easily replaceable. My documents, code, photos & videos, ete. This sort of stuff is on at least two providers as well as any original copies or copies synced/cached on other devices. And one of the backups is "soft offline" to ward against malicious tampering taking out everything (originals, backups, synced copies) in one swoop. A small selection of things (keepass db, a few legal documents, …) get the full offline backup treatment. Anything I'm only keeping for convenience or sending cloudwards for transfer/sharing purposes, doesn't need the extra protection. Though it sometimes gets it as errors in that direction are better than risking failing not-safe with other data.
    - herrherrmann 4y ago
      I see, thanks for the details! I’ve never considered differentiating between different levels of “importance” and thus different backup strategies, but it makes a lot of sense!
fevangelou 4y ago
As a current user of Dropbox, Google Drive & OneDrive I can definitely say that Dropbox beats the other two (and probably any other similar service) in both network transfers (up/down) and indexing time (especially if you consider LAN sync too for when mirroring data between devices). The level of file/folder movement you can do in Dropbox while it's sync'ing data is unparalleled. If you try doing the same e.g. with Google Drive, you will either end up with duplicate files or even lose data overall. But we all know that this probably comes at a potential cost, e.g. privacy related concerns (anyone remember the controversial Dropbox board appointment of C. Rice back in the day?), services getting hacked etc. So knowing the above and knowing that with Nextcloud, Owncloud, Syncthing etc. you fully control your cloud backup, any (perhaps) lower performance takes a step back for sure. But then again, if you're hosting on a server that's geographically close to you & on a solid datacenter with great peering (e.g. Hetzner, Scaleway/Online.net or OVH for Europeans), performance can be on par or perhaps even better compared to "established" backup cloud services.
- psadauskas 4y ago
  Several years ago, I had a personal Dropbox account with lots of stuff in it. I joined a company that also had a corporate shared Dropbox. Since I couldn't sync multiple Dropbox accounts with the same client on a single computer, I joined my personal Dropbox account to the company one. Later, when I left that job, the company removed me from the corporate Dropbox account. Dropbox removed all the corporate files from my local machine, and also all my personal ones. And deleted my personal files from my personal dropbox account, too. Luckily, I had another backup I was able to restore. Now, I never link personal and corporate accounts of any kind, and stopped using Dropbox once they stopped supporting Linux.
athrow 4y ago
I pay 4eur for 1tb managed NextCloud from Hetzner - it's a good service overall but it's unusable for photos. Apart from iCloud at 10eur per month are there any alternatives with a good photos (viewing, sharing, tagging, ai etc) integration?
- kornhole 4y ago
  Photoprism is good. Have you upgraded to NC 25 and photos 2.0? It is a massive improvement, and you can use Recognize app for auto tagging your photos using facial and other object recognition.
  - athrow 4y ago
    Hetzner offers a managed product -I'm still on version 24.0.5. The users aren't given the possibility to upgrade or configure the product. For example, I'm not able to turn on the option to create the photo thumbnails.
    - kornhole 4y ago
      I see. I manage my own instance. Hopefully they will get you to 25 soon to see this: https://nextcloud.com/blog/press_releases/nextcloud-hub-3-release-ai-photos/ https://nextcloud.com/blog/press_releases/nextcloud-hub-3-re...
- mxuribe 4y ago
  >...but it's unusable for photos... Hi @athrow, would you kindly provide a little more info here? What exactly are the issue(s) around photos? I ask only because i've been managing my own instance of nextcloud for years, and had seriously been considering moving to the managed Hetzner approach. (I love nextcloud, but just trying to reduce maintenance tasks that i do every month, etc.) So, any details or experience you would share around nextcloud and photos is greatly appreciated! :-)
  - athrow 4y ago
    Couple of issues: 1) It seems that some movies are placed first in the Photos screen, no correct thumbnails are generated for these. I'm unable to play the vide of these movies (.mov files). This means that when opening the Photos app I'm met with a wall of thumbnail placeholders. 2) It seems that for the photos the thumbnails aren't being pre-generated. There is a wait time until the thumbnails are generated. https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/admin_manual/configuration_files/previews_configuration.html https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/admin_manual/config... 3) Random error loading of the photos - some photos just don't open and display the placeholder thumbnail. 4) Linked to 1) - some videos appear between photos so I'm getting a mix of photos thumbnails and placeholder thumbnails. 5) As I scroll down the thumbnails are generated so there is a noticeable lag between scrolling and photos appearing. iCloud can generate thumbnails almost as quickly as I'm scrolling so the difference is noticeable. 6) Lack of any AI integrated into the product (face matching etc.)
kcartlidge 4y ago
Re the article and PCloud, the way the crypto folder works is that you get a mapped PCloud drive similar to OneDrive, DropBox, etc., and within there you get a "Crypto Folder". When you try and access that, it's empty. You then unlock it. However the article is wrong in that you are not prompted every time. You are prompted until it locks again, and you are in control of whether it locks automatically or not. I've used PCloud for years now. I only unlock my Crypto when I need files from inside it, keep it unlocked and accessible for as long as I need, then lock it again. It's actually a really good way of working. Less valuable files are always available in the main mapped drive so working with them is easy, but the more secure option is available too. It also supports Linux properly, and whilst not as fast as DropBox is certainly faster than Google Drive and OneDrive. And it allows multiple synced folders in addition to the mapped drive. I moved on from Google Drive when I found that some of my documents, which I'd specifically requested be mirrored locally, were found to contain http links to the online version rather than an actual local copy. Meaning some of my local backups contained useless stub files. And the total inability of the web UI to give me simple folder size details was annoying - almost like they were encouraging me to keep filling the space I had. I moved on from OneDrive when it wouldn't let me store files it thought might be dangerous (including `.js`, though I suspect they fixed that years ago). I also stored some older PHP code files in there (old enough to predate my git usage). When I looked at them they had an extra line of text added to the top of each file. I can't remember if it was a hashbang, comment, or text, as it was too long ago. I just remember my shock that they would change my uploaded files automatically. Conclusion: after trying all those the article did (except, oddly enough given the article, NextCloud) I found PCloud to be ideal. For me.

122 points by herrherrmann 4y ago

What about backblaze b2 with rclone, I'm sure there's a front end somewhere and with the clousflare cdn it's no egress cost. Or clousflares storage amounts

mickael-kerjean 4y ago
I've made one such frontend for not only backblaze but also Nextcloud (via webdav), and pretty much every protocol like FTP, SFTP, S3, ... It's all open source: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash
azalemeth 4y ago
The trouble is that backblaze is actually quite expensive for home offerings. When I looked a few months ago, the cheapest provider (per TB) by far was actually mega.nz, and they offer a platform with no upper storage cap (if you pay for it). Works with rclone, e2ee, and some other "side benefits" too. No idea what the native clients are like, however.
- dachryn 4y ago
  the big issue with Mega is always how sustainable they are. Its a business with a questionable legacy, and I have no idea what the longevity is of the service. Your data is probably fine, but it attracts a certain clientele that might put the service at risk long term of another seizure or whatever. I also use Mega for big files, but not as my primary backup solution or anything important.

gurchik 4y ago

I was looking into how I could set up Hetzner Storage Box as a storage device for Nextcloud. Somehow I didn’t even realize that Hetzner offers their own hosted Nextcloud instances (Storage Share).

iansinnott 4y ago
Yeah, it seems to be not well advertised. Have been running one for a few months now and so far it's excellent as a Dropbox replacement, mobile app and all.
- aborsy 4y ago
  How is one company replacement for another company? Both have access to data.
  - EnKopVand 4y ago
    It doesn't exactly save your privacy and it won't matter to everyone, but Hetzner is European.
fundatus 4y ago
In case you still want to build it yourself: you can use sshfs to mount a Storage box on your Hetzner server instance.

vachina 4y ago

> On top of that, I became very busy with managing software, installing updates, configuring the network access Ironically using a Windows as a NAS is easier because everything is point and click, reducing cognitive load. You can also afford to be on a slower update schedule if you stick the application behind a NAT and proxy, which blocks 99% of drive-by attacks (because the attacker don’t even know where to look).

herrherrmann 4y ago
Interesting to hear that Windows would simplify some things! Upon reflecting about my time with the Synology NAS, I remembered that there was mostly the network setup I struggled with (DynDNS, port forwarding, static IP address, remote vs. local network access, etc.) – I guess this wouldn’t have been much easier on Windows either, I suppose?

iansinnott 4y ago

Nextcloud on Hetzner has been great in my experience. Running for a few months now as a Dropbox replacement and very happy. Mobile app, mac app, it all seems to work exactly as expected. My only gripe is that they do not allow Nextcloud external storage[0] but that's understandable given what they're selling. [0]: https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/admin_manual/configuration_files/external_storage_configuration_gui.html https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/admin_manual/config...

Duralias 4y ago
https://docs.hetzner.com/konsoleh/storage-share/configuration/external-storage https://docs.hetzner.com/konsoleh/storage-share/configuratio... Seems like they do now, you just have to turn it on manually.
- iansinnott 4y ago
  Thanks! had not seen this yet.
herrherrmann 4y ago
Good to hear that you haven’t run into any issues for a few months, at least! Some peeps warned me that Nextcloud is also quite buggy, but I didn’t run into any issues yet myself.

alvarezbjm-hn 4y ago

Why didn't you stay with pcloud, again? You mentioned encryption was uncomfortable, but in the end you selected nextcloud which doesn't have reliable encryption. *I am a pcloud user since 5 years ago

tmikaeld 4y ago
I’ve used pcloud for 7 years, it’s been very stable and i even use it for backups (700GB daily). It’s the only solution I’ve been able to send at consistent 1Gbps speeds to (except when it’s many tiny files). About encryption, you unlock it once per restart and it stays open. It’s not like you have to enter password every time you move a file.. (For the backups i use rClone with encryption)
- presto8 4y ago
  Same here, happy pCloud user (unlimited plan) for 2 years now. I didn't get the encryption, but it goes on sale from time to time for $75 lifetime. I encrypt all my files locally before sending so the encryption doesn't matter for me. I use rclone with --transfers 32 (for smaller files) and it seems to work fine without throttling.
herrherrmann 4y ago
You’re right, pCloud is not a bad alternative! I remember being annoyed by the password prompt for the encryption feature, but another user here wrote that they only need it once after every restart, which seems fine to me now. Back when I tried it for the first time (2 years ago) I decided against it because the OneDrive migration was not fully working (many files were skipped and it wasn’t transparent which ones or what was the reason), and the support couldn’t help me figure out any viable solution to migrate all my files. Nowadays with the NAS the migration would have been easier, I suppose.

bfung 4y ago

iCloud+ 2TB: 9.99 € does the macOS and iOS backup. Click buy and pretty much done. Also have my parents data backed up with family sharing, I don’t have to be family IT support! If you have other devices… Tim Cook recommends replacing those with Apple devices /sarcasm Only requirement not met is not having a plan that supports more than 2T. Yes, Apple owns my life. But happy about it for now, good value.

SXX 4y ago
If only iCloud had E2E encryption ...
- sdze 4y ago
  This!!! I always laugh when Apple advertises its supposedly superior privacy features... For sensitive stuff I placed a encrypted sparsebundle on my iCloud drive.
piskerpan 4y ago
iCloud is good stuff, at least for ease of use. I use it to store my photos and passwords. Photos are then automatically synced to my Mac, which is then backed up to Time Machine. Same goes for the iCloud Keychain. You could say I’m 100% on Apple working decently, but with 3 copies I feel relatively safe. I wish there was a third party tool to occasionally verify the whole library to ensure photos don’t rot or just disappear.
throwaway0x7E6 4y ago
>good value one terabyte of HDD space ≈ $12
- rejectfinite 4y ago
  But an external HDD is not going to sync to a central server or other devices. icloud/onedrive etc is not just the space but also redundancy and backup and sync bultiin.
  - 4y ago

vxNsr 4y ago

Aside from Dropbox do any of the mentioned providers offer auto save functionality for docs and spreadsheets? For me that’s really the killer feature (that and the fact that I paid $100 for 7 years of service using MS’s employee discount offering for everyone during the pandemic). Every time people talk about self hosting or using a different cloud provider my biggest concern is auto save. And I haven’t heard anyone address it.

Nux 4y ago
When you save a document (ie ctrl+s) Nextcloud detects it and uploads the new version. It can even do some versioning.
- rejectfinite 4y ago
  Clicking ctrl+s is not autosave :) That is saving manually, and then the file gets synced. Autosave you don't need to click save/ctrl+s https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/what-is-autosave-6d6bd723-ebfd-4e40-b5f6-ae6e8088f7a5 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/what-is-autosave-... >AutoSave is a new feature available in Excel, Word, and PowerPoint for Microsoft 365 subscribers that saves your file automatically, every few seconds, as you work.
  - ilyt 4y ago
    If you use app with auto-save it will auto-sync. Many apps have that feature.
  - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
    It's been around since Office 95.
  - weberer 4y ago
    That's a feature of your editor, not the cloud sync tool. If you're editing a file in Vim, for example, called work/foo.txt, then it will create a hidden file called work/.foo.txt.swp and periodically autosave to that file. And if you have Nextcloud set to sync the work folder, then it will automatically back up .foo.txt.swp as well. https://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/recover.html#swap-file https://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/recover.html#swap-fil...

kornhole 4y ago

If comparing on costs, hosting it on home HW is by far the best way to go. I run Rsync and keep the backup in my shed so it is off-site. Nextcloud provides way more than data backups. It is best in class for personal internet services. My family and friends use my server for syncing their contacts, calendars, tasks, kanban, music, RSS, bookmarks, passwords, notes, and finances to all their devices. Ours is also setup with Talk for voice and video conferencing, polls, forms, phone tracking, CMS, mail, maps, activity pub social media, and there are a ton of other possible apps. It is perfect solution to avoid Goopple.

tmikaeld 4y ago
Why is home HW the best option? You'd have to: - Purchase the hardware & replace if it breaks - Install the software & keep it updated - Pay for electricity 3.2€, that the Hetzner 1TB storage box costs, would be cheaper than the current EU electricity cost alone.
- pjc50 4y ago
  > 3.2€, that the Hetzner 1TB storage box costs That looks like a really great deal.
- piaste 4y ago
  Presumably you'd be using your regular PC to host Nextcloud. You are correct that you'll spend more in electricity than a Hetzner sub costs, of course. (The 1TB tier costs 5.11€ now btw.) However, Hetzner storage isn't encrypted (AFAIK) so I would _never_ put my personal files in there. I pay the extra cost gladly. There's lots of alternatives, of course - right now Icedrive is the one that I find most interesting, as it has similar prices to Hetzner, provides nextcloud-ish features and is E2E encrypted. I still need to look into how trustworthy they are though.
- Semaphor 4y ago
  > 3.2€, that the Hetzner 1TB storage box costs, would be cheaper than the current EU electricity cost alone. 4.29€ in Germany. And I’d need a server that constsntly consumes 14.5W to make Hetzner cheaper, that’s 3-5 times what my homeserver averages.

teo_zero 4y ago

So this article is about looking for a perfect solution, not finding it, and finally compromising on some of them, like end-to-end encryption, ease of migration...?

socialismisok 4y ago

Is that a lot? That seems like very little data.

shapefrog 4y ago
I assume this is the test run and they will move the rest over later or something?

neamar 4y ago

My experience with Nextcloud was underwhelming. Regular crashes, very slow sync if you have thousands of files, full reupload on any change and ignored files that do not get synced with no warnings. I had made five accounts for my family and each of them got a separate blocking bug. The worst part was the syncing of shared folders. I ended up using Seafile, which is mostly open source and has beek rock solid for the past two years. I'm not looking back!

preya2k 4y ago
This! He says OneDrive is buggy, but that’s nothing compared to Nextcloud. He’s in for a big disappointment. Seafile is a much better choice if you’re only looking for FileSync (without the whole App Store thing). Another new and already better and faster contender: ownCloud OCIS, which is a complete Go rewrite of ownCloud and is already very fast and efficient and works like a charm for file sharing.
- piaste 4y ago
  One thing that made me shy away from Seafile was the limitations of its Android client. IIRC it could only upload photos, not sync folders. So couldn't use it for notes, voice recordings, downloads, books... I considered Syncthing as well, but I wanted both the arbitrary file sync and the web-based features. Figured I'd rather deal with Nextcloud's poor performance than cobble together a crappy Nextcloud clone via three separate apps. I'm definitely keeping an eye out for OCIS though.
  - Semaphor 4y ago
    Pretty much exactly the same position. I use NC for file-syncing, WebDAV, and the webinterface for those files only, but it’s not exactly great. But for similar reasons as you, it’s still the solution I’m stuck with for now.
  - ilyt 4y ago
    Syncthing works well for me (I use it also on Android to sync photos and notes) but yeah, if you want web access that's not the right tool for the job

pizza234 4y ago

Owncloud/Nextcloud... beware. It's significantly worse than the other services. I've tried really hard to make it work (including self-hosting), but it's just poor software, for a few reasons. Worst problem, which I haven't experienced with the other services, is that if there is a connection problem (this may happen routinely, if servers have scheduled downtime), files may go out of sync. Result is that, ridiculously, one may get conflicts even if they're using a single client in total. There was an issue opened, which has been ignored and autoclosed for a while. Second, lack of centralization causes a bit of a mess. One never knows which version the servers ship (although one may not care); hosts may be less realiable, and finally, hosts may change frequently (I've see a few changes in the list of free servers) so one is never sure how long the service will be offered. Also, the configuration shipped with the Nginx version was not great. Overall, I think that the software "isn't great", and I don't trust it for personal data.

ilyt 4y ago
It wins by amount of features but yes, software craftsmanship is generally shit. Hell, I managed to kill our corporate server by navigating to settings page. How ? Browser auto-filled fields JS auto-submitted that as changes. Didn't verify them working before submission either. What browser (for some fucking reason, I didn't click any confirmation) remembered in LDAP settings was no longer a correct config so it auto-broke any time I navigated into settings page.

leipert 4y ago

Personally, I really love Syncthing https://syncthing.net/ https://syncthing.net/, if you do not need an iOS client. I have it set up on all my families windows machines, my personal machines and between two NAS. One of the NAS does nightly backups to backblaze.

bayindirh 4y ago
For using Syncthing on iOS, there's Moebius sync, which encapsulates the syncthing client as a one-time paid application. Works pretty flawless.
- Hard_Space 4y ago
  Agreed, though you do have to export your photos and videos to another folder before you can sync them. I do that weekly.

thejosh 4y ago

I backup (encrypted) to multiple places, including to Google Drive using a Turkish billing account on another google account. 2tb works out to about $30USD per year. In terms of actual computer backups, thanks to btrfs+btrbk I can incremental backup every hour over LAN to my server and also to my attached USB drive. With compression/snapshots this is pretty small.

gzer0 4y ago
Thanks for the tip about the Turkish 2tb for $30/yr. Very good deal. Just did this. :)
- thejosh 4y ago
  Just be careful, I haven't heard of account locks, but I'm sure it can happen. I just use it for cheap storage. You could add your other account onto it as a family plan, so Account A (main) can share Account B's (Turkish account) storage. But given Googles track record for support... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

mandis 4y ago

I have used a couple of OneDrive family accounts to host some media files that I wanted to preserve (yt video downloads, academic courses and papers collected from questionable soruces). What are the chances MS blocks access to my data in the next 1 year?

rand49an 4y ago

It might be worth trying the Insync client instead of the official OneDrive one as I've found that quite slow to sync large libraries. It's far more customisable and runs on Linux too. https://www.insynchq.com/ https://www.insynchq.com/

rbut 4y ago

Our business migrated from OneDrive for business to a self-hosted Seafile [1] setup (we run it in a docker). Seafile has a syncing client, and a drive client (Seadrive) for viewing files as if it was a shared drive. Since moving to Seadrive I have not had a single support issue, nor heard of a single issue syncing, whereas I'd have them weekly with OneDrive to the point we'd have to delete their local files and re-setup OneDrive from scratch. OneDrive truly is an abomination built on top of archaic Sharepoint. [1] https://www.seafile.com/en/home/ https://www.seafile.com/en/home/

tacker2000 4y ago
Ive been using seafile for over 5 yrs in my business and it has so far worked flawlessly! There are only very rare hiccups with binary files such as excel sheets or PSD files, where seafile will create a “SFConflict” file. Havent figured out how to fix that het.
shellac 4y ago
> OneDrive truly is an abomination built on top of archaic Sharepoint. OneDrive _for business_ is built on Sharepoint. Onedrive ... erm ... not for business (?) is an entirely separate product, and they don't interoperate. Which is another baffling decision by Microsoft branding, since for regular users they make no distinction. It only becomes apparent when you discover you can't work with people outside the organisation.
- rejectfinite 4y ago
  >It only becomes apparent when you discover you can't work with people outside the organisation. You can share externally with Onedrive for business... It's a setting in Sharepoint admin... Once again, people here have no idea that most of their complaints with O365 is how management sets the security policy... not the platform itself... https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/turn-external-sharing-on-or-off https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/turn-external-s... :) You are right in that it used to be bad. Groove.exe... The old Onedrive for business client was a horror

clnq 4y ago

I think the author misrepresented the NAS option a bit. I have the same Sinology DS220j and from my experience, you definitely do not need to constantly install/manage software, configure network access and renew certificates. Yes, these tasks pop up every now and then, but I don't think you can say you're "very busy" with something that takes 1 hour/year. There are also significant benefits of running your own NAS - no big tech company has your documents, and they can't lock you out on a whim (such as if your Google or Microsoft account gets suspended for sometimes unfair reasons). The access speed is much higher with the data on LAN, and therefore there's little need to keep the data duplicated on your machine. And you have offline access. Security options are generally better than with most cloud providers - you can configure the firewall to deny access to anyone but whitelisted IPs, or do the many other things you can do if you own your firewall. Finally, it's not true to say that all of your files would be gone on a NAS if something happened to the server. This goes back to the saying about data copies "two is one and one is none". You can set up backups to another NAS overnight, or use one of the cheap cloud storage services not meant for random access like Backblaze B2. Of course, the NAS itself is vulnerable physically - if it gets caught in a fire, stolen, or flooded for example.

herrherrmann 4y ago
Hey, author here! I agree that objectively, it’s not much work to maintain the Synology NAS once everything is correctly set up. But I personally just got tired after attempting to configure the network access alone for the nth time. My goal was to make the NAS accessible remotely (i.e. from outside my home network) and I felt like that was already a big task (comparing different DynDNS providers, port forwarding, asking my internet provider for a static IP address). And the recurring tasks (mostly renewing certificates for the , as far as I remember) would annoy me every year or so. And I agree with the advantages you listed about a NAS setup! That’s why I tried one out, after all. I did run into some scary security situations (once the DynDNS was set up, someone was immediately trying to log in via brute force), but nothing too major, fortunately. And I never got the network setup right (e.g. to use the local network speed when I’m home and still access my files the same way when I’m away via the internet). So, these were only theoretical advantages that I could never really get to myself (I’m sure other people figured it out, but I didn’t exactly find good documentation on these things online either). And regarding your last point, I also generally agree! Although it feels silly to me to have a NAS at home and then still do regular backups via another storage/backup service elsewhere. I wouldn’t want to back up 1+ TB of files every day or even week, although there might be diffing solutions for that. Anyway, I hope this answer makes it clearer why I decided against a (Synology) NAS in the end. I’m sure other peeps figured it out and are happy with their Synology setup, but for my purposes I’ve never really gotten there.

ilyt 4y ago

I used syncthing[1] for that althought use case is a bit different - syncthing is mostly to sync the data between many devices (p2p) without option to have partial sync on a directory; you can have more than one synced directories but "one big directory" will be "one big directory" on every machine. So I have my phone pics synced to my NAS and PC, my blog's markdown files between server and my computers, another dir for some music etc. There is also option for simple versioning in case you need to dig out the old files but it's not integrated with OS as it is "just a directory". Disadvantages is that you need at least one other device running to sync as it is P2P (with some community-ran server to forward if you're NATed out of sight) but other than that, literally zero problems. [1] https://syncthing.net/ https://syncthing.net/

solstice 4y ago
> no partial sync That's not really true. You can specify which files you don't want synced. So, on my phone i can say "don't send me files that match the following pattern" https://docs.syncthing.net/users/ignoring.html https://docs.syncthing.net/users/ignoring.html So in your example you could make a subfolder "big files" and exclude that subfolder from being synchronized to your mobile device. I also love syncthing. I've got it set up to transfer my phone's pictures to my PC where I regularly sort through them and weed them out. And I've got a shared folder that's replicated across all my devices that contains my Obsidian vault, my KeePass file and other useful things

prmph 4y ago

I once lost some important files stored on OneDrive. These were pretty marge media files. There were downloaded as a zip file, apparently successfully. Then, I deleted those files from OneDrive. Imagine my surprise some time later when I went to access those files. Upon expanding the zip file, I saw that the media files in question had been replaced by some text files, with their content indicating that the download of those media files failed, and instructing me to try to download them again. What the heck, so I could download a thousand files, which realistically I can't go through one-by-one to check if any have been replaced by a text file, and OndeDrive does not alert me to the fact that some files could not be downloaded. I already had issues with the slowness and clunkiness of OneDrive, but this was the last straw. I'm migrating all my data from there.

chii 4y ago
> the media files in question had been replaced by some text files this is why a download program should verify with a hash (which should be embedded into the name of the file, or some kind of tracking metadata).
sebazzz 4y ago
Since Microsoft has been outsourcing development and QA for some of their consumer products quality has gone downhill. The picture browser is barely usable. Keeps scrolling back to the top. The iOS file provider sometimes doesn't respond. Downloading 500 photos locally on an iPad results in a unresponding app.
nh2 4y ago
I can confirm this 100%. We have multiple customers that send us data via OneDrive, and for all of them multi-file downloads do not work. Microsoft's ZIP-Streamer to download multiple files simply does not work. The text files contain exceptions with contents such as: PK^C^D^T^@^H^H^@^@<80>L^PS^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@9^@^@^@__myfile.png_Error.txtThis file cannot be downloaded. ExceptionType: ZipMeTAException. CorrelationId: 08132d8f-77b7-4c75-a66b-345e8a15c340, UTC DateTime: 8/16/2021 9:36:53 AMPK^G^H<FB>%Mw<A4>^@^@^@<A4>^@^@^@PK^C^D^T^@^H^H^@^@<80>L^PS^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@-^@^@^@myfile.png<89>PNG This is nondeterministic per file, so you have to either manually click every single file in a folder to download everything to avoid ZIP streaming (you apparently cannot use any API to download files that were just shared via link and no other auth), or repeatedly "download the ZIP to convergence" -- which is exactly as silly as it sounds.

Octabrain 4y ago

Not relate with the post but a rant against OneDrive a couple of weeks ago came to my mind: My partner uses Windows 11. She works and also studies in college. In both places they use Office360 so, she has her laptop set up with her Microsoft accounts and switches between college one and work when needs it. The other day, she came for help asking why the college OneDrive was getting full when she only has documents. Turns out that the fucking OneDrive decided to synchronize the whole user personal folder (where she has very personal stuff) into the college's OneDrive. Surprisingly, disabling such a wrong behavior was not straight forward as I expected. Microsoft has managed to make it ambiguous enough for having to spend a fair amount of time on such a simple thing. I don't know it's just another example of them trying to shovel down your throat their cloud services or just some obscure plan to simply have access to all your very personal data (or both).

pixel16 4y ago
This sounds like College IT is using Known folder redirection to have files backed up seamlessly to Onedrive. Source: Msft Employee
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Octabrain 4y ago
  So, you are telling me that my girlfriend's college IT department, has the capability, through Office 360, of manipulating which folders to backup on the clients side? Man, I really hope it's Friday and my brain is exhausted and not getting what you said straight, otherwise, this weekend is gonna be a session of urgent OneDrive removal and Linux indoctrination for her.
  - p12tic 4y ago
    Seems like that's true: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/redirect-known-folders https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/redirect-known-...
  - 4y ago

Jamie9912 4y ago

I'm thinking of moving off Dropbox. The 2TB plan pricing is quite fair, their sync client is far superior to competitors in terms of speed, efficiency and correctness.. but their plans above 2TB are just not worth the money to me (it gets more expensive per GB)

dspillett 4y ago

> if anything happened to my trusty server, all my files would potentially be gone This is what a good backup solution is for. While Hetzner's product and other hosted NextCloud instances come with some protection baked in I would still strongly suggest an off-service backup rather than keeping all your eggs in one basket. (I'm assuming here that NextCloud is being used as the primary storage, rather than a backup location for other storage, if everything else is elsewhere already then the need for an extra full backup solution is reduced)

herrherrmann 4y ago
Interesting! So, you’d still back up your full cloud storage elsewhere (Backblaze has been mentioned by other users), even though your cloud storage provider does backups themselves (e.g. Hetzner claims to do several backups every day)?
- dspillett 4y ago
  Not full, but anything that is not easily replaceable. My documents, code, photos & videos, ete. This sort of stuff is on at least two providers as well as any original copies or copies synced/cached on other devices. And one of the backups is "soft offline" to ward against malicious tampering taking out everything (originals, backups, synced copies) in one swoop. A small selection of things (keepass db, a few legal documents, …) get the full offline backup treatment. Anything I'm only keeping for convenience or sending cloudwards for transfer/sharing purposes, doesn't need the extra protection. Though it sometimes gets it as errors in that direction are better than risking failing not-safe with other data.
  - herrherrmann 4y ago
    I see, thanks for the details! I’ve never considered differentiating between different levels of “importance” and thus different backup strategies, but it makes a lot of sense!

fevangelou 4y ago

As a current user of Dropbox, Google Drive & OneDrive I can definitely say that Dropbox beats the other two (and probably any other similar service) in both network transfers (up/down) and indexing time (especially if you consider LAN sync too for when mirroring data between devices). The level of file/folder movement you can do in Dropbox while it's sync'ing data is unparalleled. If you try doing the same e.g. with Google Drive, you will either end up with duplicate files or even lose data overall. But we all know that this probably comes at a potential cost, e.g. privacy related concerns (anyone remember the controversial Dropbox board appointment of C. Rice back in the day?), services getting hacked etc. So knowing the above and knowing that with Nextcloud, Owncloud, Syncthing etc. you fully control your cloud backup, any (perhaps) lower performance takes a step back for sure. But then again, if you're hosting on a server that's geographically close to you & on a solid datacenter with great peering (e.g. Hetzner, Scaleway/Online.net or OVH for Europeans), performance can be on par or perhaps even better compared to "established" backup cloud services.

psadauskas 4y ago
Several years ago, I had a personal Dropbox account with lots of stuff in it. I joined a company that also had a corporate shared Dropbox. Since I couldn't sync multiple Dropbox accounts with the same client on a single computer, I joined my personal Dropbox account to the company one. Later, when I left that job, the company removed me from the corporate Dropbox account. Dropbox removed all the corporate files from my local machine, and also all my personal ones. And deleted my personal files from my personal dropbox account, too. Luckily, I had another backup I was able to restore. Now, I never link personal and corporate accounts of any kind, and stopped using Dropbox once they stopped supporting Linux.

athrow 4y ago

I pay 4eur for 1tb managed NextCloud from Hetzner - it's a good service overall but it's unusable for photos. Apart from iCloud at 10eur per month are there any alternatives with a good photos (viewing, sharing, tagging, ai etc) integration?

kornhole 4y ago
Photoprism is good. Have you upgraded to NC 25 and photos 2.0? It is a massive improvement, and you can use Recognize app for auto tagging your photos using facial and other object recognition.
- athrow 4y ago
  Hetzner offers a managed product -I'm still on version 24.0.5. The users aren't given the possibility to upgrade or configure the product. For example, I'm not able to turn on the option to create the photo thumbnails.
  - kornhole 4y ago
    I see. I manage my own instance. Hopefully they will get you to 25 soon to see this: https://nextcloud.com/blog/press_releases/nextcloud-hub-3-release-ai-photos/ https://nextcloud.com/blog/press_releases/nextcloud-hub-3-re...
mxuribe 4y ago
>...but it's unusable for photos... Hi @athrow, would you kindly provide a little more info here? What exactly are the issue(s) around photos? I ask only because i've been managing my own instance of nextcloud for years, and had seriously been considering moving to the managed Hetzner approach. (I love nextcloud, but just trying to reduce maintenance tasks that i do every month, etc.) So, any details or experience you would share around nextcloud and photos is greatly appreciated! :-)
- athrow 4y ago
  Couple of issues: 1) It seems that some movies are placed first in the Photos screen, no correct thumbnails are generated for these. I'm unable to play the vide of these movies (.mov files). This means that when opening the Photos app I'm met with a wall of thumbnail placeholders. 2) It seems that for the photos the thumbnails aren't being pre-generated. There is a wait time until the thumbnails are generated. https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/admin_manual/configuration_files/previews_configuration.html https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/admin_manual/config... 3) Random error loading of the photos - some photos just don't open and display the placeholder thumbnail. 4) Linked to 1) - some videos appear between photos so I'm getting a mix of photos thumbnails and placeholder thumbnails. 5) As I scroll down the thumbnails are generated so there is a noticeable lag between scrolling and photos appearing. iCloud can generate thumbnails almost as quickly as I'm scrolling so the difference is noticeable. 6) Lack of any AI integrated into the product (face matching etc.)

kcartlidge 4y ago

Re the article and PCloud, the way the crypto folder works is that you get a mapped PCloud drive similar to OneDrive, DropBox, etc., and within there you get a "Crypto Folder". When you try and access that, it's empty. You then unlock it. However the article is wrong in that you are not prompted every time. You are prompted until it locks again, and you are in control of whether it locks automatically or not. I've used PCloud for years now. I only unlock my Crypto when I need files from inside it, keep it unlocked and accessible for as long as I need, then lock it again. It's actually a really good way of working. Less valuable files are always available in the main mapped drive so working with them is easy, but the more secure option is available too. It also supports Linux properly, and whilst not as fast as DropBox is certainly faster than Google Drive and OneDrive. And it allows multiple synced folders in addition to the mapped drive. I moved on from Google Drive when I found that some of my documents, which I'd specifically requested be mirrored locally, were found to contain http links to the online version rather than an actual local copy. Meaning some of my local backups contained useless stub files. And the total inability of the web UI to give me simple folder size details was annoying - almost like they were encouraging me to keep filling the space I had. I moved on from OneDrive when it wouldn't let me store files it thought might be dangerous (including `.js`, though I suspect they fixed that years ago). I also stored some older PHP code files in there (old enough to predate my git usage). When I looked at them they had an extra line of text added to the top of each file. I can't remember if it was a hashbang, comment, or text, as it was too long ago. I just remember my shock that they would change my uploaded files automatically. Conclusion: after trying all those the article did (except, oddly enough given the article, NextCloud) I found PCloud to be ideal. For me.