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.

> 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.

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?

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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

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

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...

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.

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.

If you start on a free plan but then ultimately switch to another provider do you have any idea of how hard it would be to export and import all your tasks, files, etc?

> I've been paying for Hetzner Storage Share [0] happily to save myself the headache.

Assuming you start with NX11, which has 1TB storage, and before hitting the limit you want to upgrade to the 5TB storage, NX21.

Can you just call Hetzner and tell them they should upgrade your NX11 plan to NX21 in-place, or will you have to order NX21 and then move all the data over to the new instance yourself?

How did you solve the fact that Hetzner's instances do not have Elasticsearch set up for full-text search?

The desktop clients are anything but “mature”, and the whole point of GDocs is collaborative editing. If you don’t want to collaborate, syncthing works fine and doesn’t need a server.

One doesn't have to expose it to malicious actors. It is most-useful that way, sure. Mine is at 10.27.0.68. Have fun, hackers!

Also, I lol at most CVEs. Butterfly farted outside, oh uh.

Take the top one: In Nextcloud Desktop Client 3.13.1 through 3.13.3 on Linux, synchronized files (between the server and client) may become world writable or world readable. This is fixed in 3.13.4.

You mean to tell me a few minor point releases imitated umask, making world-readable [and possibly added writable]? Oh no! The tragedy! Keep in mind most clients are single user systems anyway.

Judge them on their facts, there are vulns and then there are vulns. CVEs are a sign of attention on a project. No more or less.

Your right of course. No way an individual can compete with an army of specialists.

But for some of us it is a bit of a hobby to run our own infrastructure. And some of it only ever runs on a private network.

I rolled my own docker setup for Nextcloud a few years ago, and couldn't be happier with the outcome. It does require me to log in and update the system and setup from time to time, but that's just a good time to drink a hot bevarage and listen to podcasts in my mind.

For anyone hosting their own instance, Nextcloud offers this scan[0] of your public facing url which might come up with something worth fixing.

[0] https://scan.nextcloud.com/

> I’m confident that the thousands of AWS/GCP/Azure/iCloud security engineers are all doing a more thorough job than you can

I'm not so confident about that:

https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=azure

It really depends on what you self-host.

https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=syncthing

"Do everything" solutions go against the principle of minimizing the attack surface.

EDIT: More is not always better in security. With more people doing more things, the statistical odds of miscommunication and misconfiguration increases.

Those cloud specialists aren't configuring your ACLs and firewalls - the most common source of severe security problems in the cloud.

I'm not a security specialist, but it seems to me that while managed services typically have better security and sysadmin resourcing, they also have the downside that their security can fail at a massive scale. If someone defeated the security of, say, GitHub, they could leak all the private repos stored there.

Managed services also have to accept connections from the public Internet, which on-premises solutions do not.

I would dig a bit more into the breakdown of the CVEs:

https://www.cvedetails.com/product/34622/Nextcloud-Nextcloud...

As well as if this reflects a systemic issue with the codebase or if it is just getting much needed attention from security researchers. More CVEs can just mean they're cleaning up after vulns really well. But at the same time, if they have critical vulns over and over again, that might indicate bad coding practices or carelessness.

Running and owning your own infrastructure exposed to the outside world can be more insecure, running your own infrastructure at home in segmented networks with wireguard will solve most problems.

>A common misconception IMO is that running and owning your own infrastructure is somehow more secure.

If done properly cve-s don't matter that much. You create a headscale install on a pi and the headscale port and your router's ssh (key only) are the only things visible from the outside. Take any other than a home router - aka something with support. And you are done.

> thousands of AWS/GCP/Azure/iCloud security engineers are all doing a more thorough job than you

All these cloud services are just attack surfaces with a huge target on their backs. And the security engineers slip up too [0], in the case of Microsoft it's become more of a meme now. The North Korean hackers basically own them.

[0] https://www.techspot.com/news/102573-microsoft-left-server-c...

I think the threat model isn't that these popular services are going to be attacked, but that they will engage in the denial of service themselves without legal recourse.

It's written in PHP, the most insecure web language on the planet.

How can I donate tonthis project? I do not see any limks to donate.

As a self hosting afficionado, I feel like the perfect Google photo replacement doesn't exist yet.

I have a synology nas and I use the synology photos app for auto uploading without loss of quality to my nas. Don't forget any picture or videos, deduplicate, figure out what you can safely delete from my phone,... All of that works great and is reliable.

The synology photos app to watch your photos though, isn't very good. Neither on mobile nor the desktop nor android TV. It's bare minimum and even that has failures.

Next cloud,... It gives a weird "I don't trust it" vibe. I want my stuff unedited unaltered, unmoved from their folder and keep your metadata elsewhere, and it just give me a wrong vibe for that. This is 100% feeling and not facts.

Immich is great but high maintenance, any update is a risk that you have way more work that planned. Their upload app need works but I use the synology one. I don't feel safe having that handle the main copies of my picture, and the dev are being super clear that I shouldn't.

Photoprism has been my go to. You need to pay for any advanced features, and unless you're solo you need them for permissions only. I love it but I feel like it's still not quite as good as I would like.

Is there any major, reliable app for that I missed?

What don't you like about the Memories app? In my experience Immich is the same thing but less mature and not nicely integrated in Nextcloud.

> their focus has been on developing features for business collaboration as opposed to personal & family ones

For people like me, who have to contend with GDPR and NIS 2 requirements on an organizational level in Germany this actually is a god-send. MS and Google don't play nice with the local law, e.g. refusing order processing agreements, although MS has recently started to move on this topic.

We replaced MS stuff (all of Sharepoint, most of PIM) with Nextcloud and MS ADS via SAML without too much of a hassle. The sync client has its nuisances (e.g. can't name Nextcloud instances) and it's getting worse for the last few versions! But it does its job, i.e. syncing, and you can always use the cloud itself.

Nextcloud Notes for Android works. You just can't use the rich editor. The plain editor works great.

Interesting.. I use Immich and have been thinking of migrating to Nextcloud Memories. May have to reevaluate.

whats up with Nextcloud Notes, in your opinion?

(I've been using it for 3 years never noticed any broke...)

Not sure how the apple rant is related to the post but; I use syncthing (via mobius sync) on my iphone and am quite happy with it. It seems to be OK with enough background syncs as it is, but to top it off i added a shortcut that keeps the app in the foreground while the phone is charging and im always up to date, pretty much instantly. Used to keep a couple hundred gb in sync that way (books, papers, org files, passwords, etc).

Not affiliated with the product.

Syncthing (via Möbius Sync) works quite (surispsibgly!) well on iOS, but there are still many paper cuts. I‘d have hoped the DMA would have forced platforms to be decoupled from services.

One of my employees use Nextcloud on its iPhone and it works fast and well.

Well, honestly, Apple is not wrong here.

App Developers usually don't give a flying cluck about anything other than their apps. Battery, CPU, mobile data? Zero consideration.

But then of course the fault lies on Apple (and MS - it's the same thing in Windows - see the CrowdStrike fiasco)

File syncing also frustrates me, although I think it's working as intended. I would expect that if I update a synced file on my laptop, that should also automatically update it on the cloud. But it seems like there's an extra step where I have to go to the web ui and say that I want it to use the updated version.

Also sharing has been very confusing, people keep thinking they've shared files they haven't.

Maybe the problem is me / us, idk. Or maybe it's better as a "personal" cloud than a shared one. I have, overall, not enjoyed using it. I wish management would just let us store docs in a git repo, which would be much more intuitive for most of us.

When I tried Nextcloud, I found there was an option to sync all photos from Google Photos. It synced around 10% photos and reported success. Overall, Nextcloud had lots of breaking bugs/instability issues like that in almost all cases I tried, so I ended up just buying a second account at a different cloud provider, so everything is now synced to 2 providers, in case I lose access to my Google account.

I experienced the bug you mentioned about 5 years ago, I wonder if they ever fixed it.

I have good experiences with Syncthing for file syncing.

You shouldn't use NC for syncing, much better options exist. NC is great for sharing files and photos though web or mobile apps.

I agree with this but at the same time I find NC very useful as a hub that centrally hosts my data and can then speak to other software using common protocols. For example my calendars, contacts, todo lists and notes are all hosted via NC, and I use WebDAV/CalDAV/CardDAV clients on my laptop and phone to interact with it.

I definitely agree NC's core functionality could be more polished though. Performance issues don't bother me as I only host for myself but there are UI issues and bugs that get in the way of functionality. I feel like everything is 90% there but there seems to be little interest in making it to 100%. The collaboration stuff they are mostly focused on is useless to me but I can understand why it's their priority, commercially speaking.

Occasionally I toy with the idea of replacing it with separate tools for file sync, photos, calendars, contacts, notes, etc, but it's very convenient to have it all as one.

I run Seafile for this reason. The sync client isn't pretty, but file transfers are fast, conflict detection good and it's pretty light on resources.

I ran OwnCloud for a while, until that project died. I liked that it focused on file sharing/syncing only. Reluctantly migrated to NextCloud and it's bloated beyond belief. It works though, and I've been too lazy to look into alternatives.

Thanks! I didn't know about that.

There is some under documented good little tools that can sync between devices, browsers and Nextcloud :

- Qownnotes for notes, selecting text from web pages and bookmarking (I'm curently testing it).

- Someone told me that Zotero can do that too.

- Vdirsyncer for synchronizing calendars and addressbook between NC and uncompatible apps (Odoo mainly).

No comment on anything else, but the tone of the page is so schoolyard. For a company that targets enterprise and government clients, petty jabs at the weather app look unprofessional.

Contempt and snobbery are no way to win customers

With Owncloud having been bought by Kiteworks it’ll be interesting to see where they’ll be heading product-wise.

Apples and oranges. Syncthing is a selfhosted p2p syncing network and it's miles better for this. Nextcloud is a selfhosted "cloud platform" like Google Apps. How good it is for each use case varies greatly. Most often it is used for easy web/mobile access for files and photos.

I don't know which one is better, but considering file hosting, sync and web access, Nextcloud works very well. Regarding usability, as NC doesn't works like Dropbox it is a matter of taste, I prefer NC over Dropbox.

Syncthing is much faster at syncing files. So much so that I use both.

100%. Nextcloud Desktop works well and i use FolderSync on android. Has worked perfectly so far :)

What issues did you find with the file storage? I’m using it backed by S3 and it hasn’t given me any issues at all so far, be nice to know what to watch out for.

I agree -- to a degree. But the "cloud first" paradigm broke MS' chokehold on the desktop and arguably enabled Linux and Mac to become viable alternatives in that space. Today I can use any major Linux dsitribution and just don't have to worry about interoperability in bread and butter use cases. Even MSO365 works fine.

Considering the continued shrieks of pain coming from the graphics design people this is not the case. Those people are still tied to desktop applications and look what freedom of choice they have. Virtually none.

Nextcloud can do local first, they call it desktop sync. Like Dropbox. https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/user_manual/en/file...

> Honestly I do not favor this paradigm

I think you are not alone, but I also wouldn't be surprised if this frog is boiled so slow that our opinion eventually becomes irrelevant: today's teenagers are *less* proficient on a keyboard than their elders, because they no longer "type" but "tap" instead. When the average exposure to computing is reduced to dumbed-down "consumption-only" devices running iOS/Android, and that goes for a generation or more, the perception of us would likely be that of old folks yelling at clouds.

Given the heavy php nature, absolutely.

I have only just started using it (and hence wanted to check what others in HN were using it for). Seems like the personal use case for file syncing is difficult; I'm more interested in self-hosting Kanban and other things I don't want to pay yet-another-SaaS a per-user-per-month for the small business tax. Setting up NextCloud with an IdP wasn't too bad, a little weird on Googe's side that it doesn't permit SAML SLO (but that's my not-terribly-deeply-informed opinion).