I tried Nextcloud a while back and was not impressed - I had issues withe the speed of the Windows sync that were determined to be “normal” with no roadmap to getting fixed. I’m now planning to move off Windows desktop so that won’t be an issue - so I thought I’d try again.

I went to nextcloud.com, clicked on Download-> Nextcloud server -> All-in-one -> Docker image - Setup AIO. This took me to the github README at Docker section. I’m already running docker for other things so I read the instructions, setup a new filesystem for my data directory and ran the suggested docker command with an appropriate “–env NEXTCLOUD_DATADIR=”. I’m then left with a terminal running docker in the foreground - not a great way to run a background server but ok, I’ve been around for a while and can figure out how to make it autostart in the background ongoing. So I move on to the next step - open my browser at the appropriate URL and I’m presented with a simple page asking me to “Log in using your Nextcloud AIO passphrase:”. I don’t have a Nextcloud AIO passphrase and nothing I’ve read so far has mentioned it. When I search for it I get some results on how to reset it, but not much help. I could probably figure that out too, but after reading some more I found that Nextcloud requires a public hostname and can’t work with a local name or IP address. I’m already running my home LAN with OpenVPN and access it from anywhere as “local” - I don’t really want to create a new path into my home network just for Nextcloud.

I’m sorry - I know this sounds like a disgruntled rant and I guess it is. I just want to check that I’m not missing obvious things before I give up again. All I want is a simple file sync setup like onedrive but without the microsoft.

  • just_another_person@lemmy.worldEnglish
    221·
    1 个月前

    There’s a lot of stuff going on here, so let me break down your post for each issue:

    1. You need to understand the difference between a docker run command, and detaching to run a container in the background. Just running it with ‘run’ keeps it in the foreground.

    2. For the passphrase issue: https://github.com/nextcloud/all-in-one/discussions/1786

    3. Lastly, if you’re not familiar with containers, and this is a single purpose machine, you’d be better off just running the bare project on the host. If there’s no need for containerization, just skip it.

    • Great Blue Heron@lemmy.caOPEnglish
      41·
      1 个月前

      You need to understand the difference between a docker run command, and detaching to run a container in the background. Just running it with ‘run’ keeps it in the foreground.

      Yes, I understand this. I was just highlighting that it’s not a great experience for a new user to follow the instructions to setup a server and be left with it running in the foreground.

      For the passphrase issue: https://github.com/nextcloud/all-in-one/discussions/1786

      Thanks! This should get me past my current hurdle so I can do some more testing. Again - not a great experience to have to come to a forum to get help to find a passphrase. I’m pretty sure I didn’t miss any steps?

      Lastly, if you’re not familiar with containers, and this is a single purpose machine, you’d be better off just running the bare project on the host. If there’s no need for containerization, just skip it.

      I’m familiar with containers, but think they’re overused. Stupid little things that are a single Python script (for example) shipping as a Docker image! But, I thought Nextcloud was complex enough to be worthy of a container? This is not a single purpose machine, but I’m an old, retired, sysadmin - I have no problem running a few different servers on the same host.

      Are you referring to the “Archive” Community Project installation method?

  • pineapple@lemmy.mlEnglish
    5·
    1 个月前

    I haven’t used nextcloud but it seems frustrating that there isn’t any really good selfhosted file cloud. Nextcloud is really chunky and inefficient but it seems to be the best option despite that.

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1·
      1 个月前

      There are a few decent options, all with some caveats:

      • Seafile - wicked fast, but uses a funky disk format, so you need either a FUSE layer or the web UI/API to access anything
      • OCIS/OpenCloud - default install uses a funky file format, but you can change this to POSIX if you want (experimental on OCIS, might be default now on OpenCloud?)
      • others - probably work fine, but they get less blog attention

      I’m playing with OCIS and I like it so far. There was some funkiness when I had things misconfigured, but now that it’s working, I like it.

      • pineapple@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        1 个月前

        I’ve heard of seafile but i remember something about it turned me off, ocis on the other hand sounds awesome, owncloud but written in go? I will definitely look into that and thanks for the recommendation.

        That’s right I need native drive mounting into dolphin and Macos finder. Seafile doesn’t have it for any linux file Explorer which means it won’t work for me.

        I think Ocis does have it though.

  • Fedditor385@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 个月前

    I wanted something that has OnlyOffice integration and basically an selfhosted Google Drive, so tried Nexcloud as the most popular solution… but… it was a pain to set up, its internal workings make handling reverse proxying a pain and it feels extremely slow.

    I will try out Seafile, they seem to have just the 2 things I need and nothing more.

      • TCB13@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        1 个月前

        Filebrowser is great, it just lacks two things 1) 2FA and 2) the always upcoming OnlyOffice integration. If we got those two nothing else could ever compete with it. It already does pre-views and text editing, but Office documents would be great.

        • loiakdsf@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
          1·
          1 个月前

          one thing still stopping me from using it is the lack of upload links. if i cannot send a link in my vacation group that everyone uploads their images to, the tool is out of the question.

          • q7mJI7tk1@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            1 个月前

            When creating a user, bind them to a folder, then when they login with said user, they only see that folder. That’s the way I’ve been handing out uploadable links.

  • ikidd@lemmy.worldEnglish
    9·
    1 个月前

    And here I am having used it for a decade and perfectly happy. I try other ones like Owncloud every once in a while and find them lacking. It was slow once upon a time but if you changed to postgres and used redis, it improved immensely. Today it’s quite fast and the sync has been working great for a long time.

    Use docker-compose with the AIO and it’ll be a lot easier to manage. There’s example compose files in the github repo.

    • Great Blue Heron@lemmy.caOPEnglish
      51·
      1 个月前

      Yeah, I can see how someone that has “grown up with it” could be happy. But as and experienced sysadmin coming at it for the first time - the documentation is a bit lacking.

      • ikidd@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        1 个月前

        Well, when I moved to the AIO, the documentation was plain wrong on several points. I submitted a bunch of changes that I had to do to make it work and they worked those changes in for the most part. Now it seems pretty workable, as a friend of mine used it to set his instance up and said it seemed to go fairly smoothly.

  • Jeena@piefed.jeena.netEnglish
    261·
    1 个月前

    Nextcloud it just too heavy I totally agree, and everything feels slow and sluggish.

    For just files I use Syncthing and couldn’t be happier, it just works in the background without a central server just syncs the files between phones, PCs and laptops by itself. I set it up like 5 years ago when I had enough of Nextcloud and to be honest most of the time I forget that I have it, but I use it every day to sync my password database for KeePassXC, my music, my private and work documents between all my devices.

  • JASN_DE@feddit.orgEnglish
    11·
    1 个月前

    AIO

    Yeah, that one is basically a take-it-or-leave-it approach. It’s a lot easier to customize when running your own Docker stack. It grew over the years and the team tries to sell it as an all-in-one SharePoint replacement (which it can be), but that also means it turned into an even more convoluted system.

    I was looking into alternatives earlier this year, maybe one of them could be a solution for you:

    • Owncloud infinite scale
    • opencloud.eu (fork of ocis)
    • syncthing (very good, depending on what exactly you’re looking for)
    • Pydio Cells

    There are others, or servers like WebDAV itself.

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      11·
      1 个月前

      Some notes:

      • syncthing - a little complex, and the file format isn’t flat files, but they have a FUSE driver you can use if you want “flat” files; it’s wicked fast at syncing data
      • OCIS/OpenCloud - default file format isn’t flat, but there is an experimental POSIX driver to get that flat file layout, in case you prefer that for backups
      • Pydio - don’t know much about it, but it seems designed for large, clustered deployments

      I’m playing with OCIS/OpenCloud and it seems like a good fit. I’m mostly holding off until I can figure out which to use (leaning toward OpenCloud).

  • sevan@lemmy.caEnglish
    2·
    1 个月前

    I’m in the process of (very slowly) migrating my household from Windows to Linux and am currently testing Nextcloud as a replacement for OneDrive. In my case, I set it up using pikapods.com because I want offsite storage. The server part of the setup was incredibly easy because the host did all the work.

    Getting my Linux client setup was kind of a pain (especially compared to the Android and Windows clients), but everything seems to work ok so far. Of course, I’m only backing up a small amount of data so far, so I can’t comment on the efficiency or speed for a major backup.

  • oranki@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    193·
    1 个月前

    My biased opinion is that most people run Nextcloud on an underpowered platform, and/or they install and enable every possible addon. Many also skip some important configurations.

    If you run NC on a bit more powerful machine, like a used USFF PC, with a good link to it, the experience is better than e.g. OneDrive.

    Another thing is, people say “Nextcloud does too much”, but a default installation really doesn’t do much more than files. If you add every imaginable app, sure it slows down and gets buggy. Disable everything you don’t need, and the experience gets much better. You can disable even the built-in Photos app if you don’t need it.

    Not saying NC is a speed daemon, but it really is OK. The desktop and mobile clients don’t get enough love, that’s true.

    I’m talking about the “bare metal” installation or the community Apache/FPM container images. AIO seems to be a hot mess, and does just about everything a container shouldn’t be doing, but that’s just my opinion.

    • atzanteol@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      93·
      1 个月前

      Many “self hosters” simply aren’t comfortable with the basics and expect things to be just an app you install. A simple two-tier app/db architecture is too complex for them (hence the prevalence of sqllite these days).

      I’ve run nextcloud for many years and was simply surprised to hear that it’s “difficult to manage and slow”. My experience has been quite the contrary - it’s been easy to keep up to date and has never failed an upgrade or lost data. And it performs “well enough” since I don’t use low-cost hardware for servers.

      My only complaint is that I need to run occ from a terminal rather than having a web interface for it. Makes running it in a k8s pod kinda annoying.

      • tripflag@lemmy.worldEnglish
        9·
        1 个月前

        one of the main reasons SQLite is gaining in popularity is because people are realizing it has higher performance than separate databases in many usecases. Keeping the communication in-process cuts a lot of overhead (network, memcpys). The fact that you also don’t have to go through the trouble of configuring a separate service is just a bonus :-)

    • surph_ninja@lemmy.worldEnglish
      31·
      1 个月前

      Agreed. You also have to make sure you get everything configured correctly. The admin should get some suggestions for set up needed in the settings screen.

      I also had to provision a lot of cpu cores for it. It doesn’t use much while idle, but try to pull a doc or picture, and you’ll see the cpu usage skyrocket.

      And at the end of the day, it’s going to be heavily impacted by your disk speed. If you want superior performance, time to consider data center grade solid state drives.

    • Jason2357@lemmy.caEnglish
      3·
      1 个月前

      Your opinion is a hard-learned lesson here. I only recently figured that out. The Nextcloud “app store” is just too tempting.

    • MaggiWuerze@feddit.orgEnglish
      2·
      1 个月前

      I am waiting for opencloud to finish its calendar implementation. The only thing I have reservations about is the fact it doesn’t use a database to store file info. Not sure I trust their approach

  • paperd@lemmy.zipEnglish
    4·
    1 个月前

    If you want to self host your contacts and calendars and have multiple users, I still don’t think there is anything better. I hope Open Cloud gets there eventually, but right now its only the beginning.

  • haverholm@kbin.earth
    45·
    1 个月前

    Agreed, Nextcloud has gone from a lean little personal cloud to a hulking enterprise hub.

    If you’re after something that’ll just sync your files between devices, try Syncthing. If you need files available online, maybe something like filestash or, like somebody else suggested, SFTPgo.

    There are also tiny, lean calendar and contact server apps out there if you decide you need those. After self hosting NC for years I’m really happy spreading out the tasks over dedicated services rather than having all my eggs in one basket.

    • redlemace@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      1 个月前

      I love syncthing!! I have one VM with only debian an syncthing and that machine is backed-up frequently. All others PC’s and vm’s syncthing to that one machine.

      All of them sync ~/downloads

      All machines I use for coding also sync ~/code

      My desktop machines sync ~/documents.

      And so on. Works great (for me)

    • paperd@lemmy.zipEnglish
      8·
      1 个月前

      the base install is still pretty lean, its only hulking if you enable all their new junk, but if you don’t enable all that, the default, at least when installed it was quite lean.

    • SayCyberOnceMore@feddit.ukEnglish
      14·
      1 个月前

      I replaced Nextcloud with syncthing (files) & radicale (calendar, contacts & todos)

      No-one used the calendar on NC, they just used their phones, Outlook, etc

      No-one used the photo gallery on NC - that’s now Immich … again, with syncthing.

      During the early days, just doing an update would break things.

      For a small home setup, NC is too big, too clunky and just not the right tool.

      • Aufgehtsabgehts@feddit.orgEnglish
        7·
        1 个月前

        Totally different for me:

        • NC-calendar syncs two different calendars (work and private) accross all my devices.
        • NC Photos with Memories organizes 2 TB of photos and has all the functions Immich has.
        • NC Password Manager syncs my Passwords
        • I share big files with my clients via NC and photo albums to friends and family.
        • NC syncs and organizes different Input-folders for my paperless-ngx-server.
        • I update NC with a small script, works every time

        So it replaces at least 5 different Programs. And it’s 80 % private use, 20 % for my business. Not too big, not too clunky, just the right tool.