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40four4 years ago

I started running a self hosted Nextcloud instance last year, and I couldn’t be happier with it! This release sounds exciting, guess it’s time to go upgrade :)

For those looking to ‘de-Google’ their lives, and control their own data Nextcloud is one of the best options out there.

reasonabl_human4 years ago

Very easy to setup and maintain with a dedicated unraid box. Grab an old dell enterprise server like the r210 II and put some WD reds in raid + zfs, install unraid, and it’s good to go.

I actually virtualize unraid within esxi so that one small 1U box can be my router / firewall and an unraid machine serving home services. Best setup I’ve ever had and learned so much along the way!

40four4 years ago

This sounds interesting, might have to look into it. Running a physical home server would be awesome, but it currently sounds above my skill level as far as hardware and networking :)

I run a cheap EC2 instance, and plug it into an S3 bucket for file storage, and my RDS MySQL database.

cbcoutinho4 years ago

How do you deal with the high costs of running an RDS instance? I think almost $30 p/m is a bit high for a small single family NC instance, when the EC2 instance running the actual service is going to a fraction of that.

40four4 years ago

That's a good question. Yeah, maybe not the best setup for everyone. You are right, the cost of a t3.small on-demand is close to $30/month, just for your NC instance alone that's not worth it.

In my case, for purposes of hobby projects and various self hosted services, I keep both MySQL & Postgres RDS instances running in perpetuity, both t3a.micro. On demand pricing is roughly $13/month, but since I plan on keeping them running 'forever' I purchase reserved instances. For a 3 year plan, 'no-upfront', this brings the cost down to about $8.75/month. Much more palatable if you ask me :)

Also, I use them for multiple projects, so the convenience factor is worth it for me. For your NC alone, I imagine it would be good enough to just run you DB server on the same EC2 instance. I doubt the database storage would eat up much disk space.

You could however, rip through a ton of disk space from file storage, so I feel like S3 buckets are a must, and cheap anyway.

teekert4 years ago

My physical home server is a nuc. Could also be a Raspberry Pi 4, little hardware skill required :)

Iolaum4 years ago

Same here. Happy user of self hosted nextcloud through the nextcloudpi project. It's been so care free I don't remember the setup details any more :)

hexanal4 years ago

To echo what the other replies are saying: mine has been running on a DigitalOcean droplet since early 2019 and I only had to reboot it once.

It syncs everything, the iOS app and web dashboard are adequate. I would recommend it (but I haven't tried anything else, other than Google Drive or Dropbox, of course)

reasonabl_human4 years ago

Haven’t used droplets, do you have to manage backups yourself or is it part of the service?

40four4 years ago

Droplets are great, and I like the ease of use of Digital Ocean. But, as far as server backups go, I've never liked managing these, so I use an external data store and DB server. In my case, my instance is wired up to an Amazon S3 bucket, and an RDS database. If you set it up this way, there is no need to worry about backups of the application server.

I could nuke the app server, change hosting providers, or if there was a hardware failure or whatever, it won't matter. I can always spin up a fresh server, and plug back into my external DB and data store.

jffry4 years ago

You can add disk-level backups to droplets, IIRC it will keep four weekly backups, for +20% price to the droplet

notesinthefield4 years ago

Its a paid add-on iirc

belval4 years ago

I think my instance is 3-4 years old at this point and I am impressed by how little work I had to put into it over the years. I set it up using Snap and it auto updates so the whole process is quite carefree.

Abishek_Muthian4 years ago

Are there recommendation for hosts which offer pricing comparable to Google One[1], has backup & trust in the community?

[1]https://one.google.com/about/plans

benhurmarcel4 years ago

Hetzner offer managed Nextcloud instances for quite cheap. It works well.

https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share

trystero4 years ago
francis-io4 years ago

I trialed setting up my own nextcloud instance a while back. It's still very complex to get working in docker. From memory, the card/caldav traefik rewrites are still not working. SSL was complex to setup with Collabora, and still required manual GUI steps to link into Nextcloud (my biggest pet peeve). I also remember getting the initial setup wrong a few times in the initial setup wizard, which required me to delete my whole local config.

Performance was a little slow, but that could be down to my own hardware. It was just consumer grade i5 cpu and a basic SSD, in docker.

The examples they provide are good, but you cant really provide for every different config. I wanted to use traefik, so I brought the complexity on my self.

Heres where I got too, eventually stopping my trial of Nextcloud. https://gist.github.com/francis-io/935be5679b3308f5fbc3fe1bb...

My wishlist for future effort by the devs would be:

- Fully configured via env vars (and in Collabora too). - I would rather any config or state be kept in the db. It makes backup and restore easier. Env vars could be set in the db, and any restart, has the set env vars overwrite anything in the db. I want to have confidence that I can restore a db + files and have a working service come back up. At the moment, I don't trust Nextcloud to always come back up. - Keep config separate from user files. - Focus on improving speed (which it looks like they are adressing with this post). - Focus on more app usability. I remember in portrait it being hard to use.

Overall, the software is great and I'm looking forward to the future, but to store my personal data I will need to have a little more confidence.

(I can't seem to make a bullet point list on HN)

ohthehugemanate4 years ago

Wow this could not be more different from my experience trying the same.

I ran nextcloud in docker-compose for 2 years, with nginx doing SSL termination in front. Granted I wasn't using the official image; I use the linuxserver.io releases for all my other services so I use them for this, too. Nextcloud's config is all in the DB, except for database and cache connection information in a single config file. PHP's config is in a separate file and some env vars (eg timezone).

I've recently moved it into my home k3s cluster (yeah, i'm one of those people), which means traefik is my new reverse proxy. Works fine. I found I can get traefik to do the DAV redirects at least with the k8s Ingress config, but I don't need to since the linuxserver image includes the redirects in its' nginx configuration.

moistbar4 years ago

I think you might be overcomplicating this, because the Docker setup of Nextcloud is one of the easiest and most streamlined I've seen on Docker Hub. Including the proxy, all you need to give it is the DNS name, the ports you want open, and where you want the data stored. Traefik is also huge overkill for a personal server, IMO. jwilder/nginx-proxy is braindead simple and has a companion container that will automatically get you LetsEncrypt certs when you make a new container that asks for it. The only thing the default Docker install is missing is a TURN server for group voice/video calls.

johnchristopher4 years ago

> The examples they provide are good, but you cant really provide for every different config. I wanted to use traefik, so I brought the complexity on my self.

I am with you. But. It's incredible how so many open source projects keep on delivering docker-compose files that either are not compatible with a reverse proxy or bundle a reverse proxy themselves.

It seems like the use case of having traefik/ngninx as a RP which does the SSL termination over how many services you want is fringe practice. Most of the apps/services I encountered could be blind to a RP but I often have to play around it.

> I want to have confidence that I can restore a db + files and have a working service come back up. At the moment, I don't trust Nextcloud to always come back up.

Well. Today OVH tried to upgrade things and it broke my VPS AND my owncloud db. Hopefully I had some sql dump backup but the DB was so borked I couldn't login in it even from root inside the container or in any other way.

I mean: don't trust the app provider to do the backup, set something up yourself.

romseb4 years ago

Although I use docker for most projects, for Nextcloud I decided to go with the snap version, which was very easy to use.[1]

[1] https://github.com/nextcloud/nextcloud-snap

3np4 years ago

Thanks for sharing your experience, given how I treat software it sounds like I would extremely frustrated with some things that "the average user" doesn't mind at all. Sounds like I should give it another year or two before considering Nextcloud (because her, I assume they're working on it!)

> (I can't seem to make a bullet point list on HN)

For short points: indent with two spaces (longer become horrible on mobile). Or just do double newlines between the points like a normal person (;))

StavrosK4 years ago

Hmm, my Docker-Compose file is much less complicated:

https://www.pastery.net/zykzva/

Though I do have a 4-line Caddy config and a Postgres server on the host.

moistbar4 years ago

GP is using a Traefik reverse proxy, which is where the extra stuff comes from.

johnchristopher4 years ago

Plus, OP is using Collabora and caldav/cardav which needs some special consideration when reverse-proxying.

+1
moistbar4 years ago
mlk4 years ago

they don't even have a decent CLI client for file syncing, I know you can use any webdav client but the GUI client seems more efficient than anything else I've tried.

l724 years ago

I really wish there was an LTS release that was supported for at least 2 years (just bugfixes, no new features). I self host my own instance, and I really just want to set it and forget it.

I don't mind doing low risk patches every few months or weeks, but I don't want to do a major version upgrade every 4-6 months.

I did my last major version upgrade only 15 months ago, and I am now 4 major versions behind, which means:

1) I upgrade from 17->18->19->20->21 and hope nothing breaks!

2) I either start over with the latest version

I like that open source moves fast, but at some point, I just want to stop fiddling with it and let it run with minimal maintenance.

znpy4 years ago

> 1) I upgrade from 17->18->19->20->21 and hope nothing breaks!

I did a similar path (started from 18 iirc) and nothing broke.

But there's a catch, because I have some safeguards in place:

1. Nextcloud has its own dataset in a ZFS zpool. I take snapshots hourly, and I took a snapshot just before upgrading

2. I run nextcloud and its own postgreql via docker-compose. the docker-compose file along with the configuration and data are stored in nextcloud's own dataset. This means that os-level dependencies are not a problem for me. this also mean that reverting the whole thing to before-upgrade is very easy: just rollback to the before-update snapshot.

3. (unrelated) snapshot are replicated to another location, which means that I might perform the upgrade on that other site and switch the dns when it's done and if i'm satisfied. I don't do that, for my personal use 1-2 hours downtime it's okay.

4. I'll let nextcloud perform its auto-upgrade procedures, take a snapshot after every upgrade, and at the end I'll perform the tasks suggested in the self-assesment page (adding indexes, changing columns types etc).

You don't have a nextcloud problem, you have a system administration problem.

l724 years ago

That's very true. I run quite a few services on my local network for my family (wireguard, nextcloud, homeassistant, frigate, pihole, jellyfin, bitwarden, ...).

While I enjoy setting up and playing with these service, I need to think about managing all these services as little as possible as I don't want to spend all my free time being a system admin.

Also, often a new release is not just a system admin task. Sure, it may not be _that_ hard to do a full backup, pull new docker images, spin them up and verify everything. The time sink comes from keeping track of all the releases of all the different projects, reading up about changes, how the upgrade process works, and so on.

On top of that, my family has become reliant on several of these services, especially nextcloud and bitwarden. The last thing they want are major changes to it. Long term stability with minimal changes can be a feature!

BrandoElFollito4 years ago

I am exactly in the same situation as you (I did not know frigate, but I do not have cameras either - otherwise you listed my main systems).

I managed to reduce administration to a minimum by using watchtower to automatically upgrade my containers and using mostly the :latest label.

This bit me only twice in a few years:

- with the 19-20 migration of Nextcloud, I had one big blank screen when logging in but the synchronization was working. Turns out it was a new default app (something about dashboarding) that was causing it. Googling an fixing took an hour.

- with one upgrade of Home Assistant where my devices were not available anymore, there was a problem with the upgrade which they fixed quickly but I have already upgraded. Reading the docs/forum and fixing took an hour.

I can live with these two hours across two or three years.

I backup /etc on my server with Borg and I know that, worst case, I will recover. I tested this DRP two weeks ago bare metal (recovering to an empty VM from scratch, that is an ubuntu ISO and ultimately getting my encrypted backups from a friend's system -> it really helped to highlight what I was missing)

+1
tp34 years ago
contravariant4 years ago

I don't disagree but as a hobbyist I don't really want system administration problems. Well and I was mostly interested in Nextcloud as a possible alternative to Dropbox/Google drive with versioning and, I hoped, backups.

However the only proper backup solution that I could confidently state would allow me to recover should disaster strike was the one you just explained e.g. putting everything in docker and snapshotting the entire filesystem. At which point I'm basically running 3 virtual file systems on top of each other just to have a better UI, which seemed a bit silly.

znpy4 years ago

First things first: don't get me wrong, I do understand your point.

The thing is: you have a system administration problem, whether you want or not (that is a big part of what you're actually paying for when you buy Dropbox or when you let Google feed on your data).

Now, as an hobbyist, when you start depending on services you set up and manage yourself, it would be a good idea to take some time to learn additional tools to enjoy your hobbies more.

Think about this as in "leveling up" your hobby.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

Now on a lighter tone, there are simpler ways to have a backup strategy, as long as you are okay with lower guarantees.

You might not use zfs, and use simple LVM snapshots. You might want to use no snapshotting at all and just do a nightly backup via a cronjob: at 3AM you just switch everything down (docker-compose down if you're using it), do a rsync to another host, start it back up. It's way simpler but you'd only get a yesterday's copy in case of problem.

But then again, that would safeguard you when doing upgrades: disable backup, perform upgrade, test everything, re-enable backup, resume operations. Worst case scenario you rsync back the yesterday's data and you resume normal operation.

+2
jerf4 years ago
+4
dsr_4 years ago
+2
nickthemagicman4 years ago
contravariant4 years ago

I agree that the problem of storing data securely is a problem that you have whether you want it to or not, but I was mostly lamenting that Nextcloud does preciously little to help help you to solve this problem, as it suffers from the same problem itself (possibly worse because now you've got a data durability problem with more moving parts).

nucleardog4 years ago

> At which point I'm basically running 3 virtual file systems on top of each other just to have a better UI, which seemed a bit silly.

This sounds like a system administration problem.

Why, exactly, did you jump to docker/etc instead of what everyone (including NextCloud) recommends which is basically "keep a copy of your nextcloud folder and a dump of your database"?[0]

If you're not confident you can properly recreate your nginx config, then keep a copy of that too.

At that point you're literally like four steps to restore from a blank slate:

  pkg install nginx php74 php74-extensions mariadb105-server
  mysql -e 'CREATE DATABASE nextcloud;'
  mysql nextcloud < backup/nextcloud.sql
  rsync /path/to/backup/ /
It sounds like most of your pain comes from trying to optimize the long tail here (recovering from a backup) at the cost of normal operation.

(FWIW, my backup strategy is cron running a shell script that "rsync/mysqldump to second disk; rclone off-site". I've recovered from this successfully (from my local copy, no transfer times) in about a half hour.)

[0] https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/admin_manual/mainte...

zelon884 years ago

HRCloud2 has built in backup capability. https://github.com/zelon88/HRCloud2

Full disclosure, I'm the developer.

phant0mas4 years ago

Have you thought about using something like https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share

Pretty cheap, it takes away the administration burden and you are the one in control :)

johnchristopher4 years ago

Then maybe it'd be less expensive (money and time) to pay for a netxloud account ?

prophesi4 years ago

> You don't have a nextcloud problem, you have a system administration problem.

Those aren't mutually exclusive. Sure, better dev ops would make major upgrades safer and easier. But for a hobbyist self-hosting their own instance, a LTS release would be a godsend to save them hours of unpaid work.

znpy4 years ago

An good hobbyist should challenge themselves from time to time ;)

+1
imwillofficial4 years ago
nickthemagicman4 years ago

Maybe they're challenging themselves on things that interest them more...and just want a functioning Nextcloud instance?

zelon884 years ago

We wouldn't tell Google engineers to mess with his Google drive in prod... why should he sacrifice data availability and integrity?

jcastro4 years ago

> the docker-compose file along with the configuration and data are stored in nextcloud's own dataset.

What a great idea!

basilgohar4 years ago

As someone who hosted his own as well, I agree with your sentiment exactly. I've taken down the server that I had hosting my own instance before this, and I am delaying setting up a new one simply because of what you've said here.

I imagine that those of us that want that kind of stability are encouraged to go with their hosted offering, but hopefully they'll see the value in having a slower and/or more stable release process.

For what it's worth, the upgrade process for the last few major versions went mostly without a hitch for me. I do have to give them credit for that. The only thing I continue to struggle with is the encryption design. I always end-up with some odd state for some files I cannot recover from.

znpy4 years ago

see my sibling comment for an idea on how to set nextcloud up for easy maintenance.

disclaimer: i have updated several version, but haven't upgraded to version 21 yet (it just got released)

nmg4 years ago

I am a huge fan of Nextcloud and I couldn't agree more. My upgrade path is to just start a new instance with a fresh sync, because I was traumatized by a turbulent and uncertain upgrade on all of my instances once about two years ago. This is a product I love and choose to rely upon for my data, every day. I'm interested in the bells and whistles and I want the platform to succeed - my preference would be an LTS for my critical data, and the option to spin up newer features separately to test before adoption.

40four4 years ago

This has spawned a huge thread that I honestly didn't read all of, but someone else mentioned to me they use the 'Community' Snap package.

I did not set mine up with this, but it apparently requires a lot less hands on maintenance. In your case you might be interested.

https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/21/admin_manual/installati...

https://snapcraft.io/nextcloud

Apparently it auto-updates for you, but I'm not sure if it will upgrade major versions, or only security patches.

Forbo4 years ago

The snap does upgrade major versions, although from my experience it tends to be on a delay to ensure stability.

40four4 years ago

Makes sense. Maintenance of self hosted services can be quite annoying, but I guess that’s the price we pay for taking control from the overlords :)

regularfry4 years ago

The answer to that ought to be `apt-get install nextcloud-server` and let the distro maintainers step in, really. Unfortunately because you can't skip versions on upgrade, it's not clear how to cleanly do that.

imwillofficial4 years ago

That’s handled by the package manager.

regularfry4 years ago

The package manager would need to have access to the code of all the intermediate versions to run the upgrades safely. That might work for some situations, but it's a hell of an overhead in general.

remram4 years ago

They also raise PHP version requirements. To keep my NextCloud on supported version, I had to update the Linux distribution on my server (was not EOL or anything) to get a PHP that supported versions of NextCloud support...

I just wanted to keep getting bug/security fixes for NextCloud.

gog4 years ago

If you are running Debian or Ubuntu use https://deb.sury.org/ for PHP.

FredFS4564 years ago

In my experience of running my own Nextcloud instance for over 4 years, I've never had an upgrade break my instance. Caveat: I'm on the stable channel and I only update when the client prompts me to update, which is a few point releases into a new release.

kop3164 years ago

That's been my experience as well. I have run Owncloud -> Nextcloud (when it was first released) since at least mid-2015, and I am on the same instance I first built.

I stay on the stable channel, and I get a notification if an app or nextcloud itself has an upgrade. The biggest issue is that the "Security & setup warnings" sometimes tells me I need to upgrade my database (and gives me the exact commands to do it) after an upgrade.

I will note that the upgrade has taken longer over the years (it used to take 5 minutes, now it can take over 30 minutes), and I think there is an issue with the backing up stage.

nucleardog4 years ago

Also started with OwnCloud and moved to NextCloud. If I'm not mistaken I've been upgrading the same NextCloud install since version 11 or so. Now on 19.

Every time it's basically:

  mv nextcloud nextcloud.r19
  mkdir nextcloud && pushd nextcloud && tar -zxf ../nextcloud-r20.tgz
  cp nextcloud.r19/config/config.php nextcloud/config/config.php
  # set permissions
  sudo -u php php occ upgrade
Then just log into the web UI and check everything's still sane and follow any upgrade suggestions it has (frequently to run commands to add columns/indexes to the database).

The instructions they provide for a manual upgrade have never failed for me: https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/admin_manual/mainte...

As far as software that needs upgrades, NextCloud has definitely been one of the least annoying things I have to deal with.

+1
waynesonfire4 years ago
znpy4 years ago

> I will note that the upgrade has taken longer over the years (it used to take 5 minutes, now it can take over 30 minutes)

In their defense, the software has grown a lot and does a lot more things nowadays, it's understandable that the upgrade process takes more.

+1
kop3164 years ago
nucleardog4 years ago

> 1) I upgrade from 17->18->19->20->21 and hope nothing breaks!

I've done this since about version 11. And I usually only get around to upgrading every few versions so it's been like... 11->12->13->14, 14->15->16, 16->17->18->19.

I do each upgrade one by one. Upgrade, login, check system status and resolve any additional steps it suggests (e.g., adding indices/columns, etc) then jump right into the next upgrade.

I've never had one fail on me. Even doing 3-4 major versions at a time it's usually less than a half hour problem.

agilob4 years ago

Haha thanks to your comment I noticed I'm using nextCloud 16. I'm going to make a few upgrades now and I'll tell you how it went.

Edit:

Miration 18->19 is now stuck on

Step 4 is currently in process. Please reload this page later.

which is downloading zip with new version...

Edit2:

I restarted installation multiple times, increased pfp-fpm and nginx timeout to 660 seconds and still getting this error.

Not today...

cyphar4 years ago

The issues with timeouts can be avoided if you use the command line upgrader:

  % php /var/www/nextcloud/updater/updater.phar
agilob4 years ago

Yea, it didn't work as expected

sudo -u nginx php updater/updater.phar

Nextcloud Updater - version: v18.0.9-8-g27dac77

Current version is 18.0.14.

PHP Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to undefined function NC\Updater\curl_init() in phar:///home/owncloud/updater/updater.phar/lib/Updater.php:455

Stack trace:

#0 phar:///home/owncloud/updater/updater.phar/lib/Updater.php(119): NC\Updater\Updater->getUpdateServerResponse()

#1 phar:///home/owncloud/updater/updater.phar/lib/UpdateCommand.php(147): NC\Updater\Updater->checkForUpdate()

#2 phar:///home/owncloud/updater/updater.phar/vendor/symfony/console/Command/Command.php(256): NC\Updater\UpdateCommand->execute()

#3 phar:///home/owncloud/updater/updater.phar/vendor/symfony/console/Application.php(820): Symfony\Component\Console\Command\Command->run()

#4 phar:///home/owncloud/updater/updater.phar/vendor/symfony/console/Application.php(187): Symfony\Component\Console\Application->doRunCommand()

#5 phar:///home/owncloud/updater/updater.phar/vendor/symfony/console/Application.php(118): Symfony\Component\Console\Application->doRun()

#6 phar:///home/owncloud/updater/updater.phar/updater.php(10): Symfony\Component\Console\Application->run()

#7 /home/owncloud/updater/updater.phar(10): require('...')

#8 {main}

  thrown in phar:///home/owncloud/updater/updater.phar/lib/Updater.php on line 455
cyphar4 years ago

You're missing php-curl (or it's installed but the module is disabled). I'd double-check that you have all of the dependencies of NextCloud installed[1], because php-curl is one of the required dependencies.

[1]: https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/21/admin_manual/installati...

m4634 years ago

I agree - I wish it was more stable and a little less promiscuous. Having your instance have to access the cloud for apps and updates is sort of counter to the "control your own server" sort of mentality.

Sort of like docker - do you have to go through their root namespace for everything?

tcit4 years ago

They can offer that with a subscription.

rektide4 years ago

> The High Performance Back-end for Files in Nextcloud is an optional, binary component developed in Rust. It is capable of maintaining a direct connection with desktop and web clients, providing file change and notification updates to the clients.

petty as heck but nextcloud being entirely php (afaik) until now has been a huge turn off. Moving some critical online bits to rust is a huge indicator to me that the team is taking resource consumption & performance optimization seriously.

anderspitman4 years ago

When it comes to self-hosting, there are 2 key components: the service software itself (ie Nextcloud), and the network plumbing to connect everything together. The networking has gotten quite complex due to NAT, HTTPS, DNS, IPv4 exhaustion, etc.

I maintain a list of software to help simplify the networking bits:

https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling

mwsfc4 years ago

Thanks for the reference. Spinning up individual containers has become quite easy these days, but agree networking still takes some work to get everything playing together nicely.

MayeulC4 years ago

I'm not sure there is such a thing, but I would like to see some CRDT format being adopted as a first-class data structure inside of nextcloud. This could be built upon for things such as the Whiteboard, but also note-taking applications (Carnet, nextcloud notes...), contacts, and more.

Also, I wish nextcloud talk was using Matrix, there seems to be much duplicated effort between the two, and I am not even sure Nextcloud Talk federates.

sundarurfriend4 years ago

To the people who have been using Nextcloud successfully for years: is your usage mainly PC-PC or PC-iOS synchronization? Is anyone here running PC-Android synchronization with files that change more often than once a day?

My experience with the Nextcloud Android app is that the automatic sync is quite limited (eg. https://github.com/nextcloud/android/issues/757, https://github.com/nextcloud/android/issues/19). Every change has to be manually synced by opening the app and navigating to the Sync option for each file. This is pretty much a dealbreaker for me, but it looks like a lot of people are using Nextcloud successfully. So I'm curious how your usage differs from mine - do you only use it for static unchanging files that don't need to be synchronized that often, or is the sync situation smoother on other devices?

ntnsndr4 years ago

I use it daily for syncing among multiple Linux PCs and two Android/Lineage devices. I actually like that mobile sync is manual because my usage is so heavy it would involve moving around a lot of data unnecessarily.

Setting up my wife with NC on mobile, however, reminded me of lots of ways in which I've accustomed myself to some pretty weird behaviors, like manual syncing, the built in text editor that doesn't load without being online.

I love NC (I use it both for personal needs and with students in my lab) but there are definitely UX issues that present a barrier to new users.

bisby4 years ago

I use it for the automatic photos upload primarily. But anything else that changes rapidly, I use a dedicated app. I've never had major issues with the core nextcloud app, but I also don't use it for anything before the photo upload.

DAVx5 for caldav stuff, Nextcloud Notes for notes.. These apps seem to handle the sync separately on their own.

e-Minguez4 years ago

I'm a little bit worried with the shift from a 'cloud' storage solution to a groupware software... I only need the storage bits but it seems they are focusing on the groupware thing lately...

nodja4 years ago

This is my problem with it as well. I used to have a self hosted nextcloud instance, but my main usage was for the file syncing. Nextcloud seems to be poor to decent at everything it does, but never great. So unless your goal is to have a suite of mediocre appliances that do the bare minimum, nextcloud is good. But all I wanted was a nice and quick way to sync all my files (I'm talking 500k files here) and have some sort of versioning in case I fuck up, so I moved to syncthing.

BrandoElFollito4 years ago

I moved from syncthing (and seafile) to nexcloud because I was missing one key thing: the ability to share files (by providing an URL, or to a group (think common files with spouse)).

Otherwise I completely agree with the sentiment.

apfsx4 years ago

I use Seafile and it has the feature to share to other users on your Seafile instance and to create a public link for uploaded files requiring no account. Is that what you're speaking about? I tried Nextcloud about a year ago, I spun up a Nextcloud and Seafile instance and Nextcloud was much slower for uploading and downloading files.

ajosh4 years ago

Syncthing is awesome for being a dropbox-like service for computers. I've setup a syncthing share as a folder inside of nextcloud which is enabled as "External Storage." This gives me the best of both worlds. Sharing between computers is rock solid. The mobile use cases is a lot more reasonable and I can share files.

I don't like syncthing on mobile because it needs to maintain its connection to sync and therefore drains battery. Also, there isn't a way to have less than 100% of a particular share local to the phone. This isn't usually waht I want on my phone.

zwog4 years ago

It does work with Nextcloud, though. [1] is the Nextcloud logo linkes from my instance, [2] is the direct link.

Or am I misunderstanding your point?

1: https://cloud.zwog.org/index.php/s/TmKoyWqxXaGAnqo

2: https://cloud.zwog.org/index.php/s/TmKoyWqxXaGAnqo/preview

BrandoElFollito4 years ago

Yes, it does work with Nextcloud - and this is the reason I moved to Nexcloud from Syncthing (and previously - Seafile).

I was just commenting on your migration to Syncthing, which is a superior syncing app IMHO. It is just that when I was using it I realized that I am missing the share ability, which is avalable in Nextcloud, though my (somehow unhappy) travel the other way round from Syncthing to Nextcloud.

I think that Nextcloud is trying to cover too much things, with half-baked apps.

berkes4 years ago

I presume that is where the money is.

Either independent contributors who make money as consultants, or a foundation that gets sponsoring, or a commercial company behind the project: enterprise has the money. So inevitable, it will gravitaye towards more enterprisey features.

I'm not saying that I have knowledge about what happens here with Nextcloud. But in FLOSS this has been seen often: from Drupal to LibreOffice: it moves away from 'consumers with simple needs' and towards 'heavy users'.

input_sh4 years ago

I feel precisely the opposite. Replacing Dropbox is fine, but replacing like the majority of Google's services is waaaay more useful.

laurent1234564 years ago

They are focusing on entreprise features, because that's where money is.

I also wish they had a separate "light" offer with just the storage and a few basic apps. As it is, I think they are stretching their resources and some part of their offering is going to suffer as a result (we already saw quite a few severe bugs in the past year and some basic functionalities, like file locking or caching, is still not right). Personally I'm only staying with Nextcloud because there's unfortunately no good alternative for now.

m4rtink4 years ago

Actually there is quite a ton of self hosted cloud storage project but very little those that provide the other services Google has the biggest lock-in on - calendar, contacts, notes, galleries, bookmarks, collaborative editing, etc.

So personally I very glad they are not just trying to be yet another cloud storage tool but also working on these IMHO more important cloud services.

achempion4 years ago

The project is great and I made simple setup in docker to play around with it. There is official docker image you can use https://hub.docker.com/_/nextcloud.

The problem I see with similar services is they all trying to pack everything. You can also install external components into your system.

What it means in practice is huge area for security vulnerabilities, challenge to host/upgrade it at home on weekends and very complex user interface (easy to mess up with privacy settings).

I really scared to host such systems because of all related issues. Maybe it isn't big deal at all.

Probably, most of home use cases can be resolved by simple XMPP server (video calls, group chat, image/links sharing) plus some shared folder across the network to store some files/photos.

ev14 years ago

I haven't used Nextcloud before, do you happen to know if there's an easy way to just want the file sharing?

I don't care for whiteboards or collaboration, I just want a Dropbox equivalent where I can upload files and give other people public or one-time or expiring links to download/wget.

mikewhy4 years ago

When you set up Nextcloud, it has a wizard prompting you for "apps" to install. Can't remember what the choices are exactly, but there's a "simple" choice that is just file sharing.

ctrlc-root4 years ago

Yes, you can disable the internal apps it ships with if you don't want to use them and just not install any third-party ones either. Only caveat is during one upgrade I noticed some of them had been re-enabled so now I make sure to check each time.

achempion4 years ago

Probably the most simple way would be to rent S3 compatible storage at Lidonde/DO and use client like https://mountainduck.io to mount it in your system.

instb3at4 years ago

I use Nextcloud for almost all the stuff I do in day to day life. I run it in docker swarm mode on a 5yr old pc running Debian @home. Freemyip for updating my dynamic IP address

What I use it for ? 1. Notes (Use FSnotes and sync md files) 2. Keypassxc for passwords (sync it using Nextcloud) 3. Photos upload (From Amazon & Google) 4. My recordings & videos 5. Documents (Moved from G Drive) 6. Bookmarks

Where I would like to see improvements? Photos - badly want this to be usable on mobile phones

I am happy overall with Nextcloud. The only time I screwed up is when I didn't know about the upgrade process. Tried moving from 18→20 and totally gone wrong.

loughnane4 years ago

Could you point me to resources on the upgrade? I'm at 20 now (what i originally installed) and am a bit miffed at the process.

I use docker-compose and nextcloud is much different than all my other containers.

lou13064 years ago

Personally, I love NextCloud as a contacts/calendar storage. I have an instance from a cloud provider, I use DAVx5 [1] to sync with my Android phone, and I set up a CalDAV account on my MacOS, so I can see nextCloud calendars on Calendar.app. Sadly, NextCloud's CardDAV doen not seem to work on macOS, but that's a relatively minor issue.

[1]: https://www.davx5.com/

znpy4 years ago

Big kudos to davx5, it helped me set up calendar integration on android.

ViViDboarder4 years ago

I have it working on macOS for me.

goalieca4 years ago

I’m in awe of something like Debian where entire mirrors have been served on ancient computers with reasonable performance. Perhaps there is a configuration issue, but at my work it is one of the slowest services aside from jira. I actually try to avoid opening jira and next cloud because it’s frustratingly slow to browse.

Edit: I was eager to see the link with the 10x performance number. I do hope it improves because we are in need of a service like that.

jerf4 years ago

"I’m in awe of something like Debian where entire mirrors have been served on ancient computers with reasonable performance."

Static file serving is easy. If you don't even need SSL because it's all signed content, it's really easy. Linux has a syscall [1] where you can tell the kernel "ok, now, send this file through this socket without bothering userspace anymore", meaning you get full kernel-mode file transfer without even context switching. I've got static file servers serving similar types of content shipping out dozens to hundreds of megabytes per second that barely hit 3% of one CPU usage.

[1]: https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/sendfile.2.html

goalieca4 years ago

Browsing a directory of essentially static artifacts is really slow in nextcloud. Git isn’t the best place to store binaries and assets and we tried nextcloud as an alternative since we are already hosting it.

jerf4 years ago

Nextcloud isn't serving static files, it was serving a database hit in a PHP environment throwing away a lot of stuff on every connection and doing all sorts of things. Presumably this newer backend does less stuff (as that is the key to performance). Debian serves static files.

pessimizer4 years ago

I don't think there was any doubt that it was an architectural question. I think the essence of what's being asked is that when jira and nextcloud should be doing next to nothing (based on the inherent complexity of what's materially being done), they seem to have to do quite a lot.

> Presumably this newer backend does less stuff

Presumably not in terms of removing features, but in terms of having been refactored.

Aachen4 years ago

Does that mean it's now reliable when putting it in a public-facing place? An orga that shall not be named used nextcloud for various important things and had it connected to the Internet, which for modern open source software is usually okay. But then a friend found that you can take the whole system down from a 56k modem (pre-auth) and it had to be recommended the Orga keep it internal, which was an issue because they iirc also used it for file sharing with externals.

As far as I know it's very rare that someone bothers with exploiting denial of service bugs, but given how trivial (triggerable by hand) this was, it's still a bit risky.

The bug was of course reported to them but closed as wontfix dontcare because there were too many other ways of taking it down already. Php was blamed iirc (which really isn't the culprit).

40four4 years ago

I'm really not sure why you are asking this question? Nextcloud is used by thousands of enterprise level & small private users on public facing servers.

Can you be more clear about what you mean by "a friend found that you can take that whole system down from a 56k modem"?

I have no idea what you mean by that. You mention denial of service. Are you claiming a Nextcloud instance can be DoS'ed by a single computer with a 56k internet connection?

Respectfully, that is quite a sensational claim/ stance to take.

Aachen4 years ago

Yeah I'm being a bit more vague than I'd like, I should have taken the effort of going to my pc (am on phone) where I have a password manager to login to the account under my real name. I don't want to connect this one too much.

Without posting the specific exploit, the issue is with the server-side sleep() in the login system. If you spawn enough threads, which you could easily do in the given time from even a 56k modem, it will for some reason crash the whole thing. Tested with a couple friends and all the instances had to be restarted manually, none of them (running on different web servers) withstood it. It's not clear why as the sleep should simply run through and then unblock the threads; for some reason that's not what happens.

Again, this was reported and they don't care. If you want more info, this should be enough to reproduce it without much effort and/or ask them about it (not sure if they made the ticket public, initial report probably was presumably private due to the pre-auth/unconditional nature).

40four4 years ago

Fair enough, no need to give any up any identifying information :)

That doesn't sound good. I guess as a personal user I'm not too worried about being DoSed, but that would certainly be more of a concern for a large organization evaluating the software.

If that is the case, then I certainly have an 'eyebrow raised'.

twobitshifter4 years ago

I tried picloud which packages nextcloud up for the raspberry pi 3B+. It really wasn’t able to handle even a single user but maybe I had something misconfigured.

kissgyorgy4 years ago

If you check my earlier comments, I often praise Nextcloud and the team behind it, but this is even more crazier by their own standards!

swiley4 years ago

I'm still not convinced this is better than a shell account with a c-git and prosody instance.

foolinaround4 years ago

what would be great is to allow a client to connect to more than 1 nextcloud instances.

For example, from my machine, i can connect to my nextcloud, and also to some folders shared from my group's nextcloud.

biktor_gj4 years ago

You can connect multiple accounts from the desktop client if that's what you mean... If you mean nextcloud to nextcloud there's also federation, but haven't really tried that as I've never needed it.

kop3164 years ago

What client are you using? I have that capability on my Android client, Linux client, and windows client, and it works extremely well.

gramakri4 years ago

The Linux client can connect to multiple nextcloud instances. Its been that way for years.

kderbyma4 years ago

nextcloud is awesome. I have been using it on my self hosted cloud and it's been fantastic. some features are better than the cloud providers

pid_04 years ago

I wish companies would stop using emojis completely. Its just weird

aargh_aargh4 years ago
josalhor4 years ago

Looks to me more like Reddit hug of death: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/lpusc7/nextcloud_is_n...

rapsey4 years ago

A /r/rust reddit thread is nothing compared to front page HN.

josalhor4 years ago

To be fair, at the time I wrote my comment the Reddit post had 400+ votes and the HN one was in the early double digits IIRC.

GreenToad4 years ago

anyone remembers the term "slashdotted"?

imwillofficial4 years ago

Oh to be young again

reasonabl_human4 years ago

No, where did this come from?

phaer4 years ago

https://slashdot.org/ was quite a popular source of tech-related news back in the very late 20th and early 21th century

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot

jaxslayerv4 years ago