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Nextcloud is a nightmare. First if all, it wants to do everything and does none well (or better than specialized apps) Its internals are a shitshow - a questi

Nextcloud is a nightmare. First if all, it wants to do everything and does none well (or better than specialized apps) Its internals are a shitshow - a question about getting the real IP of the calling client raised a 10 pages discussion where people said "it works" and other days "it does not". The "solution" required you to change a volatile setting within the docker container (and do it again when the container changes) Finally the upgrade is insane. I once tried to upgrade my installation, was told that n+2 upgrades are not possible (fair enough) and ... the installer destroyed the database. What a piece of crap. Thanks god for backups.

sneak 2y ago
Nextcloud ate my data on a single user installation with no fancy settings turned on, with no upgrades attempted. The sync client on desktop said it was fully synced. Only 200GB of 800GB was on the machine. It’s some of the worst software I have ever used. It’s the pentagon house with the inverted roof built with the two-clawed hammer that eevee described.
- TonyTrapp 2y ago
  I had a similar experience with ownCloud. Regularly, file uploads were timing out, leaving the database in an inconsistent state (apparently), which then later caused the files to be deleted on my desktop where the files were coming from. I'm still not sure why I put up so long with it. It was a slow mess, especially on the single-board computer I ran it on, and SyncThing was a breeze compared to it, with no data loss at all (and much faster on the same SBC).
  - BrandoElFollito 2y ago
    I ultimately moved to Syncthing too. It requires understanding how it works, but once you do it is wonderful.
- touggourt 2y ago
  > The sync client on desktop said it was fully synced. Only 200GB of 800GB was on the machine. Did you read the manual? It is recommended for such size to do the first sync using rsync (or similar) followed by the CLI command to build the files database.
  - mort96 2y ago
    Silent data loss like that is not acceptable, even if there would have been a way to sync which would have worked around the data loss bug.
  - BrandoElFollito 2y ago
    A service that manages data cannot fail on such things. Nextcloud could refuse this first sync and point to solutions but losing data just "because the manual says rsync" is not acceptable
    - touggourt 2y ago
      You're right.
lolinder 2y ago
> it wants to do everything and does none well I can't speak to the other points you made because this has always stopped me from investing in it. What I need in my stack is a focused Google Docs alternative, but every time I've installed it (3-4 times at this point) I'm quickly overwhelmed by the quantity of stuff it includes and by how complicated actually setting up the Docs replacement was (at the time the recommendation was to install Collabora and link it up with Nextcloud, which I never could get working). What I did see out of the box was a slow and bloated web portal, a bad calendar, a bad video conferencing app, a file backup solution, and a terrifying app store filled with add-ons that may or may not be maintained. Oh, and now it looks like they have an AI assistant? I'm honestly relieved to see this here and know it's not just me. I ended up going with Seafile for file backups and have been very happy with it, though I'd still love to find a focused collaboration tool I can run.
- klabb3 2y ago
  > it wants to do everything and does none well On that topic, it’s amusing to see when the “are we a product or a platform?” confusion jumps from its native host (publicly listed tech corps) to FOSS projects – different species altogether. The idea of owning your own server just like any other device like laptops, smartphones and tablets, is just wonderful. But that means Linux! And Linux is absolutely infamous for poor application distribution (well technically the Linux distros). So now people make their own half-assed “app stores”, which is infinitely worse. We would need a platform spec so that application developers can publish, users can discover and deploy, and platform providers can implement against a shared spec. That would be such a major step away from the surveillance economy and towards data sovereignty.
  - bzzzt 2y ago
    > We would need a platform spec so that application developers can publish, users can discover and deploy, and platform providers can implement against a shared spec. That's been tried with Linux Standard base, but it seems 'standardise on glibc 2.31 and Qt 3' is not a viable way to describe system dependencies. Such a spec also doesn't exist for Windows or macOS systems. If you target 'living' operating systems you need living applications that are updated to keep working. We're well past the point you can assume some 20 year old binary will work unless you're running it in an emulator.
n3storm 2y ago
Between a couple of initial versions after fork there where a couple of bumpy upgrades, but last 4 years have been smooth
soraminazuki 2y ago
Nextcloud's "internals are a shitshow" because Docker's networking stack prevents it from getting the IP of the calling client? That's an unreasonable take. Why single out Nextcloud here?
- BrandoElFollito 2y ago
  This is a Nextcloud issue, in the way it forwards headers. See https://help.nextcloud.com/t/how-to-get-the-real-ips-in-logs/83096/32?u=wpq https://help.nextcloud.com/t/how-to-get-the-real-ips-in-logs... for the long thread
thepill 2y ago
Running the snap-version since 5+ years without any problem
komali2 2y ago
This might be true but I finally deployed nextcloud for our co-op because I couldn't find any other solution to easily have a shared calendar with granular permissions to accounts I assign for write privileges, but also a dynamic ICS file download endpoint I can publicly expose. I tried a couple other caldav servers and none had this. So it does at least one thing better than specialized apps, which I typically prefer to use.
TheChaplain 2y ago
I've run Nextcloud for almost 3 years now via docker on a vps , it hosts my contacts, calendars and files. There is a apache reverse proxy in front of it, and a postgresql-database in the back. Not once had I any serious issues updating when pulling new updated images. Occasionally it whines about missing indices, but that is easily fixed using the occ command line tool. The clients real IP is forwarded by the proxy. What I want to say is just that Nextcloud works fine.
- doubled112 2y ago
  I have also found that if you stick to the core functionality it works fine. As soon as I started to add apps from the store it starts to be a pain. An upgrade comes out and you’re stuck on that version until they all update, OR you update not realizing and lose the functionality for some time. Since I self-host a bunch of apps, it made more sense to use different apps dedicated to those features, like Miniflux or Navidrome. Not for everybody though.
  - kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 2y ago
    You haven't necessarily gained anything by going to managing standalone apps individually, though. You've removed the unifying layer, but you're now having to keep up with the app versions and upgrade them individually by hand instead of letting the unifying layer handle it.
    - BrandoElFollito 2y ago
      If you use docker + watchtower all this is done automatically
      - doubled112 2y ago
        I don’t use Watchtower, but a script that takes a btrfs snapshot before doing a docker compose pull, then docker compose up. Same idea, just safer and fewer surprises.
Namidairo 2y ago
The insane thing when I tried to update Nextcloud, was that it kept timing out the download because it was too slow, and then required me to delete the upgrade in progress file in order to try again...
- clort 2y ago
  I've seen this, I think its the web server timing out.. I use the php script updater/updater.phar directly and that works just fine
johnsea 2y ago
With AIO upgrade is a piece of cake. -- For us, Nextcloud is a godsend, some things could be improved, true, but they are improving; we are more than grateful for this comprehensive software. Much less hassle (and even less expensive) than Microsoft before.
baby_souffle 2y ago
Yep. Running it on k8s has similar issues. I only used it as sync for my obsidian notes with occasional (maybe once a month) access to those notes via web ui. I wasn’t happy with how it would reformat my notes on save. Sync thing supports encrypted storage in VPS and is trivial to run in k8s and it’s been much better for my needs.
davidee 2y ago
Nightmare seems like a bit of hyperbole. Look, it's not without its quirks, but it's pretty reliable. Speed and responsiveness can be further upped by using an in-memory cache like Redis/Valkey. Nextcloud can try to be everything it wants, but as users we can ignore that and stick to file-sharing/online/cloud storage. If one is using it primarily for file storage/sharing, it works reasonably well. We have ~1TB of Nextcloud data on an NFS share (itself snapshotted ZFS), backed up to B2 regularly. If something happens to a Nextcloud server (and it has), restoring the data is as simple as recreating the users and copying over the data directory for each user (provided you're not using it for calendaring and such). A quick OCC command to re-index user data and we're back. We haven't had any issues running the docker image (orchestrated via HCP Nomad). We have also helped a friend run Nextcloud for their small non-profit, as a snap on an EC2 instance in AWS. It keeps itself up-to-date and has been pretty-much problem free for years. EBS Snapshots cover backups there.
ruph123 2y ago
I run my own nextcloud server now for over 5 years. There are some frustrations like the photo app which is uselessly slow. But for the files sync, contacts/calendar and some other apps it works well. It _does_ offer a million different things and some of those are half baked but the core functionality (a dropbox-like file storage) is decent in my experience. Updates have never been an issue. And honestly I am always a bit surprised by that. I don’t update to a new version right away but when I’m ready, I change the version in the docker compose, pull, re-up the container. It performs the database migration and brings up everything. Never had an issue after using it for years. Not sure what your exact setup is, but it’s certainly not a nightmare to use.
- akvadrako 2y ago
  The file syncing is not very good either. It's based off WebDAV and very slow. If you only have a few files it's workable, but it isn't competitive with Dropbox, SyncThing or any of the popular alternatives.
  - avuton 2y ago
    I've noticed issue with older hardware. After a recent upgrade to modern hardware (LAN based), all performance issues have been resolved. Currently serving to >30 devices, including 4K media to multiple endpoints and 100Ks files.
  - ruph123 2y ago
    It is also workable if you have more than just a few files. I sync several GB of data, books, papers, notes, photos, videos, etc. Constantly changing and it has been pretty fast. Webdav is just the interface used for external services that support the protocol. Which may not be the best tech but it certainly is supported by many, many apps and services. I cannot connect a random e.g. pdf reading app with Syncthing and maybe not with Nextcloud directly but certainly via webdav.
- MayeulC 2y ago
  For photos, I highly recommend "Memories" : https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/memories https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/memories They should make it the default, IMO.
anonymousiam 2y ago
I agree that it has its problems. Last week, I noticed that one of my contacts had an invalid date for their birthday. Try as I may, I cannot get Nextcloud to recognize 1/5/2000 as a valid date. (And no, it's not a localization problem.)
DistractionRect 2y ago
I found keeping it in docker makes it less of a nightmare, but it's definitely not something I'd trust with anything important. There's like dozen scenarios where you end up with 0 byte files with no warning, error, etc. Sometimes it's an uploading issue, sometimes it's a syncing issue, etc. And they are still open, mutli-year, issues. I ran into a version of it where existing uploads were replaced with zero byte versions, so I had to manually run a script to find them and I restore a pervious version. If it tried to do other things, like photos, document editing, collab, etc and did those poorly that would be fine. Failing at the most central task of just storing the data is not. It's still alpha quality, and if one intends to use it, it's critical you setup monitoring infrastructure to ensure file integrity (backups should go without saying).
jraph 2y ago
Seeing this top comment is sad. I handle several nextcloud instances, one of them updated from owncloud, I'm very happy, it does a lot of stuff well and when you need specialized software you can because it's just files. Updates have been painless.
- mardifoufs 2y ago
  That's cool! Other people have had problems with it, and losing data is bad enough that it outweighs good experiences, even if they are a majority. So it's a good thing that people share their less positive experiences rather than just "it works fine for me", as one is more actionable than the other when we are discussing a "home cloud" solution.
donmcronald 2y ago
> Finally the upgrade is insane. Wait until you see the "solution" for dealing with the client mangling timestamps [1]. After you've been burned by server updates, and then burned by client updates, with solutions that push the problems onto the system admin, you start to wonder if using it in the first place was a mistake. IIRC, part of the reason they forked was because OwnCloud wasn't moving fast enough. My experience makes me think OwnCloud might have been right. 1. https://github.com/nextcloud/desktop/wiki/How-to-fix-the-error-invalid-or-negative-modification-date https://github.com/nextcloud/desktop/wiki/How-to-fix-the-err...
kyrofa 2y ago
> First if all, it wants to do everything and does none well (or better than specialized apps) Yep. And any extra apps beyond the default just make upgrades go sideways. I've given up on it. Using syncthing instead (just for file syncing) and haven't looked back. It's not my favorite either, but just because it's a pain to configure. Once configured, it's been rock solid.
- blitzar 2y ago
  > Using syncthing instead (just for file syncing) and haven't looked back After giving up on Nextcloud I tried syncthing too - hated it - and most of that time was pandemic and not like I was syncing outside of my own home network. Went back to dropbox instead (just for file syncing) and haven't looked back.

sneak 2y ago

Nextcloud ate my data on a single user installation with no fancy settings turned on, with no upgrades attempted. The sync client on desktop said it was fully synced. Only 200GB of 800GB was on the machine. It’s some of the worst software I have ever used. It’s the pentagon house with the inverted roof built with the two-clawed hammer that eevee described.

TonyTrapp 2y ago
I had a similar experience with ownCloud. Regularly, file uploads were timing out, leaving the database in an inconsistent state (apparently), which then later caused the files to be deleted on my desktop where the files were coming from. I'm still not sure why I put up so long with it. It was a slow mess, especially on the single-board computer I ran it on, and SyncThing was a breeze compared to it, with no data loss at all (and much faster on the same SBC).
- BrandoElFollito 2y ago
  I ultimately moved to Syncthing too. It requires understanding how it works, but once you do it is wonderful.
touggourt 2y ago
> The sync client on desktop said it was fully synced. Only 200GB of 800GB was on the machine. Did you read the manual? It is recommended for such size to do the first sync using rsync (or similar) followed by the CLI command to build the files database.
- mort96 2y ago
  Silent data loss like that is not acceptable, even if there would have been a way to sync which would have worked around the data loss bug.
- BrandoElFollito 2y ago
  A service that manages data cannot fail on such things. Nextcloud could refuse this first sync and point to solutions but losing data just "because the manual says rsync" is not acceptable
  - touggourt 2y ago
    You're right.

lolinder 2y ago

> it wants to do everything and does none well I can't speak to the other points you made because this has always stopped me from investing in it. What I need in my stack is a focused Google Docs alternative, but every time I've installed it (3-4 times at this point) I'm quickly overwhelmed by the quantity of stuff it includes and by how complicated actually setting up the Docs replacement was (at the time the recommendation was to install Collabora and link it up with Nextcloud, which I never could get working). What I did see out of the box was a slow and bloated web portal, a bad calendar, a bad video conferencing app, a file backup solution, and a terrifying app store filled with add-ons that may or may not be maintained. Oh, and now it looks like they have an AI assistant? I'm honestly relieved to see this here and know it's not just me. I ended up going with Seafile for file backups and have been very happy with it, though I'd still love to find a focused collaboration tool I can run.

klabb3 2y ago
> it wants to do everything and does none well On that topic, it’s amusing to see when the “are we a product or a platform?” confusion jumps from its native host (publicly listed tech corps) to FOSS projects – different species altogether. The idea of owning your own server just like any other device like laptops, smartphones and tablets, is just wonderful. But that means Linux! And Linux is absolutely infamous for poor application distribution (well technically the Linux distros). So now people make their own half-assed “app stores”, which is infinitely worse. We would need a platform spec so that application developers can publish, users can discover and deploy, and platform providers can implement against a shared spec. That would be such a major step away from the surveillance economy and towards data sovereignty.
- bzzzt 2y ago
  > We would need a platform spec so that application developers can publish, users can discover and deploy, and platform providers can implement against a shared spec. That's been tried with Linux Standard base, but it seems 'standardise on glibc 2.31 and Qt 3' is not a viable way to describe system dependencies. Such a spec also doesn't exist for Windows or macOS systems. If you target 'living' operating systems you need living applications that are updated to keep working. We're well past the point you can assume some 20 year old binary will work unless you're running it in an emulator.

n3storm 2y ago

Between a couple of initial versions after fork there where a couple of bumpy upgrades, but last 4 years have been smooth

soraminazuki 2y ago

Nextcloud's "internals are a shitshow" because Docker's networking stack prevents it from getting the IP of the calling client? That's an unreasonable take. Why single out Nextcloud here?

BrandoElFollito 2y ago
This is a Nextcloud issue, in the way it forwards headers. See https://help.nextcloud.com/t/how-to-get-the-real-ips-in-logs/83096/32?u=wpq https://help.nextcloud.com/t/how-to-get-the-real-ips-in-logs... for the long thread

thepill 2y ago

Running the snap-version since 5+ years without any problem

komali2 2y ago

This might be true but I finally deployed nextcloud for our co-op because I couldn't find any other solution to easily have a shared calendar with granular permissions to accounts I assign for write privileges, but also a dynamic ICS file download endpoint I can publicly expose. I tried a couple other caldav servers and none had this. So it does at least one thing better than specialized apps, which I typically prefer to use.

TheChaplain 2y ago

I've run Nextcloud for almost 3 years now via docker on a vps , it hosts my contacts, calendars and files. There is a apache reverse proxy in front of it, and a postgresql-database in the back. Not once had I any serious issues updating when pulling new updated images. Occasionally it whines about missing indices, but that is easily fixed using the occ command line tool. The clients real IP is forwarded by the proxy. What I want to say is just that Nextcloud works fine.

doubled112 2y ago
I have also found that if you stick to the core functionality it works fine. As soon as I started to add apps from the store it starts to be a pain. An upgrade comes out and you’re stuck on that version until they all update, OR you update not realizing and lose the functionality for some time. Since I self-host a bunch of apps, it made more sense to use different apps dedicated to those features, like Miniflux or Navidrome. Not for everybody though.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 2y ago
  You haven't necessarily gained anything by going to managing standalone apps individually, though. You've removed the unifying layer, but you're now having to keep up with the app versions and upgrade them individually by hand instead of letting the unifying layer handle it.
  - BrandoElFollito 2y ago
    If you use docker + watchtower all this is done automatically
    - doubled112 2y ago
      I don’t use Watchtower, but a script that takes a btrfs snapshot before doing a docker compose pull, then docker compose up. Same idea, just safer and fewer surprises.

Namidairo 2y ago

The insane thing when I tried to update Nextcloud, was that it kept timing out the download because it was too slow, and then required me to delete the upgrade in progress file in order to try again...

clort 2y ago
I've seen this, I think its the web server timing out.. I use the php script updater/updater.phar directly and that works just fine

johnsea 2y ago

With AIO upgrade is a piece of cake. -- For us, Nextcloud is a godsend, some things could be improved, true, but they are improving; we are more than grateful for this comprehensive software. Much less hassle (and even less expensive) than Microsoft before.

baby_souffle 2y ago

Yep. Running it on k8s has similar issues. I only used it as sync for my obsidian notes with occasional (maybe once a month) access to those notes via web ui. I wasn’t happy with how it would reformat my notes on save. Sync thing supports encrypted storage in VPS and is trivial to run in k8s and it’s been much better for my needs.

davidee 2y ago

Nightmare seems like a bit of hyperbole. Look, it's not without its quirks, but it's pretty reliable. Speed and responsiveness can be further upped by using an in-memory cache like Redis/Valkey. Nextcloud can try to be everything it wants, but as users we can ignore that and stick to file-sharing/online/cloud storage. If one is using it primarily for file storage/sharing, it works reasonably well. We have ~1TB of Nextcloud data on an NFS share (itself snapshotted ZFS), backed up to B2 regularly. If something happens to a Nextcloud server (and it has), restoring the data is as simple as recreating the users and copying over the data directory for each user (provided you're not using it for calendaring and such). A quick OCC command to re-index user data and we're back. We haven't had any issues running the docker image (orchestrated via HCP Nomad). We have also helped a friend run Nextcloud for their small non-profit, as a snap on an EC2 instance in AWS. It keeps itself up-to-date and has been pretty-much problem free for years. EBS Snapshots cover backups there.

ruph123 2y ago

I run my own nextcloud server now for over 5 years. There are some frustrations like the photo app which is uselessly slow. But for the files sync, contacts/calendar and some other apps it works well. It _does_ offer a million different things and some of those are half baked but the core functionality (a dropbox-like file storage) is decent in my experience. Updates have never been an issue. And honestly I am always a bit surprised by that. I don’t update to a new version right away but when I’m ready, I change the version in the docker compose, pull, re-up the container. It performs the database migration and brings up everything. Never had an issue after using it for years. Not sure what your exact setup is, but it’s certainly not a nightmare to use.

akvadrako 2y ago
The file syncing is not very good either. It's based off WebDAV and very slow. If you only have a few files it's workable, but it isn't competitive with Dropbox, SyncThing or any of the popular alternatives.
- avuton 2y ago
  I've noticed issue with older hardware. After a recent upgrade to modern hardware (LAN based), all performance issues have been resolved. Currently serving to >30 devices, including 4K media to multiple endpoints and 100Ks files.
- ruph123 2y ago
  It is also workable if you have more than just a few files. I sync several GB of data, books, papers, notes, photos, videos, etc. Constantly changing and it has been pretty fast. Webdav is just the interface used for external services that support the protocol. Which may not be the best tech but it certainly is supported by many, many apps and services. I cannot connect a random e.g. pdf reading app with Syncthing and maybe not with Nextcloud directly but certainly via webdav.
MayeulC 2y ago
For photos, I highly recommend "Memories" : https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/memories https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/memories They should make it the default, IMO.

anonymousiam 2y ago

I agree that it has its problems. Last week, I noticed that one of my contacts had an invalid date for their birthday. Try as I may, I cannot get Nextcloud to recognize 1/5/2000 as a valid date. (And no, it's not a localization problem.)

DistractionRect 2y ago

I found keeping it in docker makes it less of a nightmare, but it's definitely not something I'd trust with anything important. There's like dozen scenarios where you end up with 0 byte files with no warning, error, etc. Sometimes it's an uploading issue, sometimes it's a syncing issue, etc. And they are still open, mutli-year, issues. I ran into a version of it where existing uploads were replaced with zero byte versions, so I had to manually run a script to find them and I restore a pervious version. If it tried to do other things, like photos, document editing, collab, etc and did those poorly that would be fine. Failing at the most central task of just storing the data is not. It's still alpha quality, and if one intends to use it, it's critical you setup monitoring infrastructure to ensure file integrity (backups should go without saying).

jraph 2y ago

Seeing this top comment is sad. I handle several nextcloud instances, one of them updated from owncloud, I'm very happy, it does a lot of stuff well and when you need specialized software you can because it's just files. Updates have been painless.

mardifoufs 2y ago
That's cool! Other people have had problems with it, and losing data is bad enough that it outweighs good experiences, even if they are a majority. So it's a good thing that people share their less positive experiences rather than just "it works fine for me", as one is more actionable than the other when we are discussing a "home cloud" solution.

donmcronald 2y ago

> Finally the upgrade is insane. Wait until you see the "solution" for dealing with the client mangling timestamps [1]. After you've been burned by server updates, and then burned by client updates, with solutions that push the problems onto the system admin, you start to wonder if using it in the first place was a mistake. IIRC, part of the reason they forked was because OwnCloud wasn't moving fast enough. My experience makes me think OwnCloud might have been right. 1. https://github.com/nextcloud/desktop/wiki/How-to-fix-the-error-invalid-or-negative-modification-date https://github.com/nextcloud/desktop/wiki/How-to-fix-the-err...

kyrofa 2y ago

> First if all, it wants to do everything and does none well (or better than specialized apps) Yep. And any extra apps beyond the default just make upgrades go sideways. I've given up on it. Using syncthing instead (just for file syncing) and haven't looked back. It's not my favorite either, but just because it's a pain to configure. Once configured, it's been rock solid.

blitzar 2y ago
> Using syncthing instead (just for file syncing) and haven't looked back After giving up on Nextcloud I tried syncthing too - hated it - and most of that time was pandemic and not like I was syncing outside of my own home network. Went back to dropbox instead (just for file syncing) and haven't looked back.