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Comment by 12ian34 | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious as to for how long you've been using this setup specifically in regard to Nextcloud, and how many and what volume of files you store in it?

I've set up a few Nextcloud instances in the last 2 years on Digital Ocean VPSs and Raspberry Pis and I ran into so many problems and difficulties which scaled with the quantity and size of files I hosted on it. I took care in setting up everything to a relatively solid standard (memcache etc.), but I found Nextcloud to be so unreliable for syncing particularly with the official Android and Linux clients. Plus, there was the whole botched version 20 upgrade.

I find Nextcloud tries to solve too many problems turning it into a bloated mess even for a moderately experienced user.

For file storage only, I've found Syncthing on a Raspberry Pi at home syncing over Zerotier (for when I'm not at home) to be a much more robust, user-friendly and scalable solution, despite it syncing whole folders only.

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Raspberry Pis are toys, don't use them for anything important.

I've been running NextCloud on an Intel NUC i7 in a Linux container so I can easily snapshot and backup. Recovery is easy in the event of a hardware failure as replacement NUCs are available off the shelf. All I need to do is swap the HD and RAM and I am back in business.

i have all of that with a pi 4 with an usb 3.0 2tb disk connected..

Raspberry pis are so cheap that you can keep a spare one around just in case the hardware fail.. although i have 3 hosting different stuff in my network and does not fell the need to have a spare one.

i can get a new one by tomorrow cheaper then any used NUC out there and all i have to do is remove the sd card from one and put in the other, plug the usb disk and i am good to go.

my home servers are all pis, with the older turning 8y already, and have not had a single problem with them all this time.. likely my disk will die much sooner then the pi.

Indeed, I don't really consider personal projects, and niche pdfs I want to sync between devices that important. Also, I didn't want to spend ~£400 on something like an Intel NUC

When I was picking a self-hosted Dropbox alternative, I ended up going with Seafile rather than Nextcloud since it was a lot more focused (just file sync) and people said it was much faster. It's got a few rough edges but the core functionality has been rock solid. Granted, I've only had about 100 GB max stored in it.

I didn’t realise Seafile Pro was free for up to 3 users. I had previously looked but gave up as no self hosted solution was really comparable to OneDrive or Dropbox.

I've been using Seafile for several years, and highly recommend it.

For the past couple of years, I've had it running in Docker on a cheap Azure VM, backed by blob storage. I've got around 2TB in there, and it all works marvellously.

We've been using Nextcloud in my home for the better part of a year now, almost completely problem free. I even have auto-updates via watchtower. We have 136 GB of data on it (just checked now). Not sure where that lies compared to your data. It is running on a fairly beefy box though, not a rPi. Only issues so far have been needing to set up cron, which took about 5 minutes doing it the "easy" way (host runs a docker command in it's crontab). Collabora was super annoying to set up, but that was a one-time cost.

Interesting. My volumes were similar and I even had issues with my 'beefy' enough DO VPSs. The primary issues for me were with the clients, especially if I, say, moved a folder of 2000 files from one directory to somewhere else within the Nextcloud drive using the UI. Anyway, I'm not here to troubleshoot that - I've long since decided that it's just too much for my personal simple use case of keeping two folders in sync with each other on different devices. Out of curiosity, how did you install Nextcloud? Snap/Docker/Manual?

Ah, during our migration we did try to move thousands of files from a "Dropbox" folder to a "NextCloud" folder, and indeed the Windows client was not happy. Since it was a one-time thing, the solution was to move the files "manually" over SSH and just run the NextCloud "scan" utility to pick up the changes on disk.

I'm running NextCloud via the official Docker image, reverse proxied through nginx.

My good old friend, the Nextcloud scan utility :) I lost count of the number of times I ran that and the trashbin cleanup. These are both problems I never ever want to have to deal with.

eh, I ran the command, alt-tabbed to something more interesting, and checked later in the day to see that it was done. Never had an issue running it, and only ever needed to when I was doing the initial data migration.

Syncthing is great! Are you using zerotier for transport security. Or does it improve speed as well? Off-site syncs are far too slow for me. Luckily, it's very rare that I have to do them.

I'm using Zerotier so that my devices can stay in sync with my raspberry pi at home when I'm outside of my local network. I found this a simpler solution to dynamic DNS.

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