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I would love to like Nextcloud, it's pretty great that it does exist. Just that makes it better than... well everything else I haven't found. What frustrates m
by palata 1y ago
I would love to like Nextcloud, it's pretty great that it does exist. Just that makes it better than... well everything else I haven't found.
What frustrates me is that it looks like it works, but once in a while it breaks in a way that is pretty much irreparable (or at least not in a practical way).
I want to run an iOS/Android app that backs up images on my server. I tried the iOS app and when it works, it's cool. It's just that once in a while I get errors like "locked webdav" files and it never seems to recover, or sometimes it just stops synchronising and the only way to recover seems to be to restart the sync from zero. It will gladly upload 80GB of pictures "for nothing", discarding each one when it arrives on the server because it already exists (or so it seems, maybe it just overwrites everything).
The thing is that I want my family to use the app, so I can't access their phone for multiple hours every 2 weeks; it has to work reliably.
If it was just for backing up my photos... well I don't need Nextcloud for that.
Again, alternatives just don't seem to exist, where I can install an app on my parent's iOS and have it synchronise their photo gallery in the background. Except I guess iCloud, that is.
- dade_ 1y agoThe next cloud android app is particularly bad if you use it to back up your cameras DCIM directory then you delete the photos on your phone. It overwrite the files on Nextcloud as new photos are taken. I get why this happened but it is terrible.
- Yie1cho 1y agoit's bad for everything. i have lots of txt files on my phone which are just not synced up to my server (the files on the server are 0 byte long). i'm using txt files to take notes because the Notes app never worked for me (I get sync errors on any android phone while it works on iphone).
- branon 1y agoWill this also happen if you let the Nextcloud app rename the files as it uploads them? I usually take that option and haven't had an issue with this although I don't have it set to delete from my phone after uploading.
- lompad 1y agoRecently people built a super-lightweigt alternative, named copyparty[0]. To me that looks like it does everything people tend to need without all the bloat. [0]: https://github.com/9001/copyparty https://github.com/9001/copyparty
- nucleardog 1y agoI think "people" deserves clarification: Almost the entire thing was written by a single person and with a _seriously_ impressive feature set. The launch video is well worth a quick watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15_-hgsX2V0&pp=ygUJY29weXBhcnR5 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15_-hgsX2V0&pp=ygUJY29weXBhc... I don't say this to diminish anyone else's contribution or criticize the software, just to call out the absolutely herculean feat this one person accomplished.
- mouse-5346 1y agoYeah people there pretty much mean one dude. It's mine boggling how much that little program can do considering it had one dev.
- tspng 1y agoDon't forget, "Lot of the code was written on a mobile phone using tmux and vim on a bus". That's crazy.
- Imustaskforhelp 1y agoI have tried to run micro https://micro-editor.github.io/ https://micro-editor.github.io/ on my phone but this is some other beast if someone is running tmux and vim on their phone I have found that typing normally is really preferably on android and usually I didn't like having to press columns or ctrl or anything so as such since micro is really just such a great thing overall, it fit so perfectly that when I had that device, I was coding more basic python on my phone than I was on my pc Although back then I was running alpine on UserLand and I learnt a lot trying to make that alpine vm of sorts to work with python as it basically refused to and I think I learnt a lot which I might have forgotten now but the solution was very hacky (maybe gcompat) and I liked it
- Larrikin 1y agoFor your specific use case of photos, Immich is the front runner and a much better experience. Sadly for the general Dropbox replacement I haven't found anything either.
- guilamu 1y agoI'd say Ente-photo is at least as good if not better than Immich. https://github.com/ente-io/ente https://github.com/ente-io/ente
- omnimus 1y agoI would say the opposite. Ente has one huge advantage and that it is e2ee so it's a must if you are hosting someone else photos. But if you are planning to run something on your server/NAS for yourself then Immich has many advantages (that often relate to the e2ee). For example... your files are still files on the disk so less worry about something unrecoverably breaking. And you can add external locations. With Ente it is just about backing up your phone photos. Immich works pretty well as camera photo organizer.
- dangus 1y agoThe Ente desktop app has a continuous export function that’ll just dump everything into plain file directories. It makes a little more sense when you’re using their cloud version, because otherwise you’re storing the data twice.
- fauigerzigerk 1y agoI'm a very happy Ente Photos user as well.
- palata 1y agoDoes it have a mobile app that backs up the photos while in the background and can essentially be "forgotten"? That's pretty much what I need for my family: their photos need to get to my server magically.
- pjs_ 1y agoI’ve tried every scheme under the sun and Immich is the only thing I’ve ever seen that actually works for this use case
- exe34 1y agoI use syncthing, I've got a folder shared between my phone, laptop and media center, and it just syncs everything easily.
- kelvinjps10 1y agoI do the same it's so convenient
- dns_snek 1y agoIt works well for smaller folders but it slows down to a crawl with folders that contain thousands of files. If I add a file to an empty shared folder it will sync almost instantly but if I take a photo both sides become aware of the change rather quickly but then they just sit around for 5 minutes doing nothing before starting the transfer.
- exe34 1y agohow many thousands? I have a folder with a total of 12760 files spread within several folders, but the largest I think is the one with 3827 files. I've noticed the sync isn't instantaneous, but if I ping one device from the other, it starts immediately. I think Android has some kind of network related sleep somewhere, since the two nixos ones just sync immediately.
- dns_snek 1y agoI have around 4000 photos and videos in this folder. I don't know what it is but I know that it's not a network issue. I think it takes a long time because the phone CPU is much slower than the desktop but I couldn't tell you what it's doing, the status doesn't say anything useful except noting that files are out of sync and that the other device is connected.
- exe34 1y agoyes I do wish it would say a bit more of what's going on and have a big button that says "try it now".
- benhurmarcel 1y agoI stopped using Nextcloud when the iOS app lost data. For some reason the app disconnected from my account in the background from time to time (annoying but didn't think it was critical). Once I pasted data on Nextcloud through the Files app integration, it didn't sync because it was disconnected and didn't say anything, and it lost the data.
- xeromal 1y agoOof, sounds painful. It's hard to use anything when you can't trust its fundamentals.
- ToucanLoucan 1y agoI never had data outright vanish, but similar to the comment you replied to, it was just unreliable. I found Syncthing much more useful over the long haul. The last 3 times I've had to do anything with it were simply to manage having new machines replace old ones. Syncthing sadly doesn't let you not download some folders or files, but I just moved those to other storage. It beats the Nextcloud headache.
- cG_ 1y agoI might be misunderstanding what you mean, but maybe the .stignore[1] file is what you're looking for? Apologies if it isn't :-) [1] https://docs.syncthing.net/users/ignoring.html https://docs.syncthing.net/users/ignoring.html
- ToucanLoucan 1y agoOh no worries, yeah that works like gitignore, I’m talking more like how Nextcloud and Dropbox let you like, have a list of folders and checkboxes where you can be like “this machine doesn’t need my family photo collection synced to it” kinda thing. Which to my knowledge syncthing doesn’t have. Don't apologize tho! I appreciate the help!
- miroljub 1y ago
- pdntspa 1y agoSyncThing
- stavros 1y agoFor photos, you can't beat Immich.
- nolan879 1y agoThis also happened to me with my nextcloud, thankfully I did not lose any photos. I transitioned to Immich for my photos and have not looked back.
- jacomoRodriguez 1y agoI switch to FolderSync for the upload from mobile. Works like a charm! I know, it sucks that the official apps are buggy as hell, but the server side is real solid
- jjav 1y agoNextcloud is great, but I don't use it for backup (didn't realize it would even do that) so maybe that's why. I use it for a family cloud service for chat, shared todo lists, shared calendar and shared editing docs (don't want to put anything private on e.g. google docs). For all that, it's full of awesome.
- zelphirkalt 1y agoYou could set up Syncthing. Once properly configured (including ignored files, that have names that cannot be handled by the backing storage or clients), you shouldn't need to touch it much.
- cess11 1y agoWebDAV is a nightmare, breaks when you least need it. Once I moved a few TB over it, it took a week with all the retries and troubleshooting. As I understand it you can work around it with Nextcloud by running some other transfer service and have it watch and automatically import certain directories.
- ergocoder 1y ago> The majority of CEO job is excellent judgement and motivating people. Ain't that the problem with everything. They all look good on paper until you try it for a while.
- caycep 1y agoAll I know about Nextcloud is that HN is full of people complaining about Nextcloud