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Comment by jlkuester7 | Hacker News Reader

Good open source self-hostable alternatives exist! https://nextcloud.com/ (no affiliation, just a longtime happy user) is great for file sharing and even collaborative online document editing.

If you do not want to host your own instance, there are many great providers who will host one for you at a low cost.

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My nextcloud instance killed itself during an update. I wrote a blog post about it and people regularly write to thank me, so it wasn't an isolated instance. Syncthing is much simpler, and practically bulletproof. It really just works.

Yeah, Nextcloud is not the first thing I would reach for if all you want is "simple" and "bulletproof". I am not a pro-SRE, but I have managed, with the help of backups, the successfully run a Nextcloud instance for a small group of people for the past ~5+ years. It has not been without glitches, but the challenges have been no worse than any other service I host. The more features you have, the more things can go wrong...

I have never once had Nextcloud updates work properly. It doesn't matter if I update as soon as the new version is ready or if I wait long enough for my current version to go EoL, the updater breaks something critical and my instance is non-functional.

Despite that, nextcloud/owncloud do what I want/need and I'm not sure if Syncthing does. So I keep stubbornly re-trying and just spin up a new instance when the old one dies.

Weird, I've been running and updating NextCloud since version 13, and I never had any problems as long as I didn't try to upgrade 2 release up at once and carefully applied the recommended database updates, etc.

Do you run many plugins, or do you keep it fairly stock? I'm beginning to wonder if that could be some of the issue, even though the upgrade guidelines include instructions on upgrading plugins. My setup has otherwise been pretty simple (single host for db and web server hidden behind a separate reverse proxy) and I follow the upgrade guidelines as closely as possible (which is usually exactly). Restoring from a backup doesn't work either because it thinks I'm trying to downgrade the version, which isn't supported.

I just spun up a new instance, I'll see if keeping it simple works for me. It's also on a VM now so I can take a snapshot and roll back to that if it breaks rather than relying on the faulty backup steps.

I have few basic applications : agenda, tasks, deck, music, mail. Not too many.

Syncthing is like Dropbox. If that's what you need, it's great.

I have so many problems with nextcloud! It kills itself from time to time, often during updates. Randomly problems with folder rights when everything was working before. It's slow and the code is php. The official documentation and forum are a mess.

I have a lot of files, the database is not able to handle them correctly, even the cleaning commands take hours and do not work.. I regularly lose files in the database and need to re-upload them from the file in the server..

The app on Android has a lot of issues synchronizing my files, too many too often I guess.

I'm hoping to see a good alternative to nextcloud one day.

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