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Comment by neamar | Hacker News Reader

My experience with Nextcloud was underwhelming. Regular crashes, very slow sync if you have thousands of files, full reupload on any change and ignored files that do not get synced with no warnings. I had made five accounts for my family and each of them got a separate blocking bug. The worst part was the syncing of shared folders.

I ended up using Seafile, which is mostly open source and has beek rock solid for the past two years. I'm not looking back!

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+1 here. Nextcloud is a pile of PHP scripts, while Seafile splits and diffs individual file blocks, and absolutely flies at 'whatever the lower of of your network and drive speed is', handling any file sizes you can throw at it.

On the other hand, Seafile is also a binary distributed by Chinese team, and if I was a Chinese secret service, I'd build in all the backdoors I can, which I guess already happened.

Their documentation says they can provide end2end encryption, but the docs also seems to contain a number of caveats that a security professional might find problematic - or not (IANASP): https://manual.seafile.com/security/security_features/#how-d...

It's not weak as such, but there are gotchas in this faq (mostly related to metadata and key file caching) that effectively mean a casual user won't have end to end encryption. That said, I do not know of a cloud provider that does this well. You could just as easily build on top of this service with rclone (and the crypt backend) as any other. Then it is probably fine, but then you are already not a casual user.

I will say that in the west it is probably better to have your personal life invaded (which for a casual user is the reality you must face. It will happen) by China than the US (broadly your choices due to prism), as they are less likely to have an impact on your day-to-day functioning.

> On the other hand, Seafile is also a binary distributed by Chinese team, and if I was a Chinese secret service, I'd build in all the backdoors I can

This was the reason I tried and subsequently passed on Seafile. It’s one thing if it’s just my stuff, but I was setting it up as a syncing server for friends and family. I just wasn’t comfortable with this prospect and being responsible for others’ files, as well.

> Seafile is also a binary distributed by Chinese team

Web search for Seafile turned up a GitHub repository, so seems like it's open source? That doesn't rule out the possibility of a carefully-hidden back door that no one has found yet, of course. But I think it should increase confidence over a closed-source binary distribution.

Regardless, this level of xenophobia is getting a little tiresome. If you have evidence that this project is run by or sponsored by the Chinese government, then sure, I'd find that a showstopper as well. But a group of people, who just happen to be Chinese, building something shouldn't immediately be grounds for dismissal. China is a very big place, with a truly staggering number of people, and the Chinese government -- contrary to popular belief -- doesn't have its hands in everything its citizens do.

This! He says OneDrive is buggy, but that’s nothing compared to Nextcloud. He’s in for a big disappointment.

Seafile is a much better choice if you’re only looking for FileSync (without the whole App Store thing).

Another new and already better and faster contender: ownCloud OCIS, which is a complete Go rewrite of ownCloud and is already very fast and efficient and works like a charm for file sharing.

One thing that made me shy away from Seafile was the limitations of its Android client. IIRC it could only upload photos, not sync folders. So couldn't use it for notes, voice recordings, downloads, books...

I considered Syncthing as well, but I wanted both the arbitrary file sync and the web-based features. Figured I'd rather deal with Nextcloud's poor performance than cobble together a crappy Nextcloud clone via three separate apps.

I'm definitely keeping an eye out for OCIS though.

Pretty much exactly the same position. I use NC for file-syncing, WebDAV, and the webinterface for those files only, but it’s not exactly great. But for similar reasons as you, it’s still the solution I’m stuck with for now.

Syncthing works well for me (I use it also on Android to sync photos and notes) but yeah, if you want web access that's not the right tool for the job

If you are looking for sync only there is Syncthing

As a sysadmin managing Nextcloud on an on premise VPS, we have none of the problems you mentioned. We have 20+ accounts, tons of shared files, and whatnot.

Just upgraded to Nextcloud 25 (literally 20 minutes ago), and no problems whatsoever.

I deployed it on a virtualized server which is not extremely powerful, and everybody seems to enjoy the productivity boost it brought into the team.

I upgraded to Nexcloud25 and all Gui Customization's are gone...once again. I don't really like the php-nextcloud, using it for well over 4 years there is always something not right. I really hope the go-version is better.

Isn't the go version limited to owncloud? Are they open sourcing the new code base?

Looks like NextCloud is also thinking about migrating to Go.

We have 150+ and had a bunch of problems, users with weirdly long file/dir names having some problems, and sync very rarely being flaky.

The performance is underwhelming (it's PHP after all) but we just threw CPU power at the problem...

snark remark... Has nothing to do with PHP but more with the implementation.

As with javascript a lot of PHP's problems are not inherent to the language but rather to the culture around it. It must be avoided for that reason, but it is hard to state that in full every time. So folks use the shorthand you see.

What is tons in this case? Thousands? Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands?

Surprising that your and the OP's experiences are so different. Based on the description, I think it's safe to assume the OP also has thousands of files, some of them very large.

I wonder if the issue is with Nextcloud itself, or with the particular hosting provider.

As polished as the UI looks. You can’t cover up the fact it’s a PHP turd under the hood.

Would it run better if it was a "Python turd" under the hood?

Likely, although that’s not ideal either. Would want to see it in something performant like Go or Rust.

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