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Comment by palata | Hacker News Reader

I would love to like Nextcloud, it's pretty great that it does exist. Just that makes it better than... well everything else I haven't found.

What frustrates me is that it looks like it works, but once in a while it breaks in a way that is pretty much irreparable (or at least not in a practical way).

I want to run an iOS/Android app that backs up images on my server. I tried the iOS app and when it works, it's cool. It's just that once in a while I get errors like "locked webdav" files and it never seems to recover, or sometimes it just stops synchronising and the only way to recover seems to be to restart the sync from zero. It will gladly upload 80GB of pictures "for nothing", discarding each one when it arrives on the server because it already exists (or so it seems, maybe it just overwrites everything).

The thing is that I want my family to use the app, so I can't access their phone for multiple hours every 2 weeks; it has to work reliably.

If it was just for backing up my photos... well I don't need Nextcloud for that.

Again, alternatives just don't seem to exist, where I can install an app on my parent's iOS and have it synchronise their photo gallery in the background. Except I guess iCloud, that is.

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I stopped using Nextcloud when the iOS app lost data.

For some reason the app disconnected from my account in the background from time to time (annoying but didn't think it was critical). Once I pasted data on Nextcloud through the Files app integration, it didn't sync because it was disconnected and didn't say anything, and it lost the data.

Oof, sounds painful. It's hard to use anything when you can't trust its fundamentals.

I never had data outright vanish, but similar to the comment you replied to, it was just unreliable. I found Syncthing much more useful over the long haul. The last 3 times I've had to do anything with it were simply to manage having new machines replace old ones.

Syncthing sadly doesn't let you not download some folders or files, but I just moved those to other storage. It beats the Nextcloud headache.

I might be misunderstanding what you mean, but maybe the .stignore[1] file is what you're looking for? Apologies if it isn't :-)

[1] https://docs.syncthing.net/users/ignoring.html

Oh no worries, yeah that works like gitignore, I’m talking more like how Nextcloud and Dropbox let you like, have a list of folders and checkboxes where you can be like “this machine doesn’t need my family photo collection synced to it” kinda thing. Which to my knowledge syncthing doesn’t have.

Don't apologize tho! I appreciate the help!

You can achieve this by having multiple sync folders instead of one folder with everything. Then you can configure exactly what you sync where.

“This machine doesn’t need my family photo collection synced to it” is .stignore. It’s a bit confusing because .stignore is more like .git/info/excludes than .gitignore in that it’s not synced between machines[1]. (If you wanted a synced ignores file then you need to #include that file from each machine’s .stignore manually.) And what’s ignored on one machine doesn’t then need to be ignored on the others, which will still sync it between themselves in that case. So no pretty checkboxes, but echo /Photos >>.stignore on the machine in question and you should be good (including to delete the Photos subdirectory on that machine).

[1] https://docs.syncthing.net/users/ignoring.html

Oh! Holy shit, that's SO useful. Thank you for taking the time to explain!

Recently people built a super-lightweigt alternative, named copyparty[0]. To me that looks like it does everything people tend to need without all the bloat.

[0]: https://github.com/9001/copyparty

I think "people" deserves clarification: Almost the entire thing was written by a single person and with a _seriously_ impressive feature set. The launch video is well worth a quick watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15_-hgsX2V0&pp=ygUJY29weXBhc...

I don't say this to diminish anyone else's contribution or criticize the software, just to call out the absolutely herculean feat this one person accomplished.

Yeah people there pretty much mean one dude. It's mine boggling how much that little program can do considering it had one dev.

Don't forget, "Lot of the code was written on a mobile phone using tmux and vim on a bus". That's crazy.

I have tried to run micro https://micro-editor.github.io/ on my phone but this is some other beast if someone is running tmux and vim on their phone

I have found that typing normally is really preferably on android and usually I didn't like having to press columns or ctrl or anything so as such since micro is really just such a great thing overall, it fit so perfectly that when I had that device, I was coding more basic python on my phone than I was on my pc

Although back then I was running alpine on UserLand and I learnt a lot trying to make that alpine vm of sorts to work with python as it basically refused to and I think I learnt a lot which I might have forgotten now but the solution was very hacky (maybe gcompat) and I liked it

I do a lot of development and sysadmin stuff on phones and tablets, to a large degree due to PentiKeyboard. It helps a lot to see the entire screen and have all the usual keyboard sends that a regular, physical keyboard has.

https://software-lab.de/penti.html

I'm using micro in termux on my android. The keyboard of termux is quite adapted to the CLU bindings (ctrl-f, ctrl-s,...). My main use is to take notes, though I bought a physical small bluetooth keyboard perfect for making a little bit of python scripts from time to time.

I must admit that coding in vim on a kinda big project on a smartphone is really impressive.

There was an HN discussion about it 3 months ago with responses from the author, in case anyone is interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44711519

I found copyparty to be too busy on the UI/UX side of things. I've settled on dufs[0], quick to deploy, fast to use use, and cross platform.

[0] https://github.com/sigoden/dufs

Do you have a systemd for it, run it with Docker, or simply manually as needed? I find its simplicity perfect!

I run it manually as needed. It's already packaged for both Alpine Linux and Homebrew which suits my ad-hoc needs wonderfully!

This is not an alternative as it only covers files. Mind what is in the article: "I like what Nextcloud offers with its feature set and how easily it replaces a bunch of services under one roof (files, calendar, contacts, notes, to-do lists, photos etc.), but ".

For us Nextcloud AIO is the best thing under the sun. It works reasonably well for our small company (about 10 ppl) and saves us from Microsoft. I'm very grateful to the developers.

Hopefully they are able to act upon such findings or rewrite it with go :-). Mmh, if Berlin (Germany) wouldn't waste so much money in ill-advised ideology-driven and long-term state-destroying actions and "NGOs" they had enough money to fund 100s of such rewrites. Alas...

There is no way it’s going to be completely rewritten from scratch in Go, and none of whatever Germany is or isn’t doing affects that in any way shape or form.

Actually, it's already been done by the former Nextcloud fork/predecessor. OwnCloud shared a big percentage of the Nextcloud codebase, but they decided to rewrite everything under the name OCIS (OwnCloud Infinite Scale) a couple of years ago. Recently, OwnCloud got acquired by Kiteworks and it seemed like they got in a fight with most of the staff. So big parts of the team left to start "OpenCloud", which is a fork of OCIS and is now a great competitor to Nextcloud. It's much more stable and uses less resources, but it also does a lot less than Nextcloud (namely only File sharing so far. No Apps, no Groupware.)

https://github.com/opencloud-eu

Thanks for sharing this, I've been wanting to look at private cloud stuff but it was all written in PHP. It looks like OpenCloud is majority Go with some php and gherkin, which is a step in the right direction.

I have OpenCloud working on my home server, and it features integration with the Collabora suite of software for office apps. Draw.io is also already supported.

They offer a Docker compose file that sets up Collabora for you, but I can't find anything info on other apps, let alone integration. Where can I see what they support?

There are no "Apps". It's not a universal App platform like Nextcloud. It's just file sharing (and optionally a Radicale calender server via Environment Variable but without UI). There's optional plugins to open vendor specific files right in the browser.

You're right, it was my mistake. The docker compose file can set up Collabora for you and allows you to open documents from inside OpenCloud by opening the file in an embedded Collabora view. Likewise, Draw.io works in a similar fashion, opening a view to embed.diagrams.net. Underneath it's just hosting the files and offloads the operations to other apps. It's convenient, but not particularly sophisticated.

OCIS does only a small part of why people deploy NextCloud. I have run it, it’s great, but it’s not a replacement for the full suite nor is it trying to be.

It makes perfect sense to me that nextcloud is a good fit for a small company.

My biggest gripe with having used it for far longer than I should have was always that it expected far too much maintenance (4 month release cadence) to make sense for individual use.

Doing that kind of regular upkeep on a tool meant for a whole team of people is a far more reasonable cost-benefit analysis. Especially since it only needs one technically savvy person working behind the scenes, and is very intuitive and familiar on its front-end. Making for great savings overall.

Hetzner‘s storage share product line offers a managed Nextcloud instance. I‘m using them as I didn‘t want to care about updating it myself.

The only downside is you can‘t use apps/plugins which require additional local tools (e.g. ocrmypdf) but others can be used just fine.

Calling remotely hosted services works (e.g. if you have elasticsearch on an vps and setup the Nextcloud fulltext search app accordingly)

Why should Germany be wasting public money on a private company who keeps shoveling more and more restrictions on their open-source-washed "community" offering, and whose "enterprise" pricing comes in at twice* the price MS365 does for fewer features, worse integration, and with added costs for hosting, storage, and maintenance?

* or same, if excluding nextcloud talk, but then missing a chat feature

Could you expand on what restrictions they have placed on the community version?

At the very least their app store, which is pretty much required for OIDC, most 2FA methods, and some other features, stops working at 500 users. AFAIK you can still manually install addons, it's just the integration that's gone, though I'm not 100% sure. Same with their notification push service (which is apparently closed source?[0]), which wouldn't be as much of an issue if there were proper docs on how to stand up your own instance of that.

IIRC they also display a banner on the login screen to all users advertising the enterprise license, and start emailing enterprise ads to all admin users.

Their "fair use policy"[1] also includes some "and more" wording.

[0] https://github.com/nextcloud/notifications/issues/82

[1] https://nextcloud.com/fairusepolicy/

> their app store, which is pretty much required for OIDC, most 2FA methods, and some other features, stops working at 500 users

How dare they. I just want to share photos and calendar with the 502 people in my immediate family.

This may come as a surprise to you, but there are organizations, for example German municipalities, that have more than 500 users but can't afford to start pumping tens or hundreds of thousands per year into a file sharing service. Nextcloud themselves recognize this and offer 95%+ discounts to edu, similar to what Adobe, Microsoft, and Git[Hub,Lab] are doing.

It makes a lot of sense for Germany to keep some independance from foreign proprietary cloud providers (Microsoft, Google); Money very well invested imo. It helps the local industry and data stays under German sovereignity.

I find your "open-source-washed" remark deplaced and quite deragoraty. Nextcloud is, imo, totally right to (try to) monetize. They have to, they must further improve the technical backbone to stay competitive with the big boys.

I think what you described is basically ownCloud Infinite Scale (ocis). I haven't tested it myself but it's something I've been considering. I run normal owncloud right now over nextcloud as it avoided a few hiccups that I had.

OCIS seems to have lost most of their team. They now work on a fork called OpenCloud. https://github.com/opencloud-eu

Germany does fund and work on a couple of serious OSS projects. Look for Opencode. They are also actively working on the matrix spec.

Copyparty looks amazing, wow

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15_-hgsX2V0

I watched the video, too, and while amazing, it's the poster child for feature creep. It starts out as a file server, and at some point in the demo it's playing transcoded media and editing markdown??

Really impressive, but I think I'll stick to NFS.

> everything people tend to need

> NOTE: full bidirectional sync, like what nextcloud and syncthing does, will never be supported! Only single-direction sync (server-to-client, or client-to-server) is possible with copyparty

Is sync not the primary use of nextcloud?

Personally, the only thing I need is stable clients on both desktop and mobile with bidirectional sync. Copyparty seems really cool, but it explicitly does not do that.

Have you considered syncthing? There’s shiny new and super cool Sushi Train (or Sync Train by other name) app for iOS (I wish the author would make it a paid app, so much I like it!): https://github.com/pixelspark/sushitrain

Not affiliated, but a very happy user.

I mention iOS, because that was what I needed personally, as there was syncthing for Android since forever.

It's an amazing piece of software. If only the code & the configuration was readable. It's overly reliant on 2-3 letter abbreviations, which I'm sure has a system, but I haven't yet been able to decipher.

For your specific use case of photos, Immich is the front runner and a much better experience. Sadly for the general Dropbox replacement I haven't found anything either.

I'd say Ente-photo is at least as good if not better than Immich.

https://github.com/ente-io/ente

I would say the opposite. Ente has one huge advantage and that it is e2ee so it's a must if you are hosting someone else photos. But if you are planning to run something on your server/NAS for yourself then Immich has many advantages (that often relate to the e2ee). For example... your files are still files on the disk so less worry about something unrecoverably breaking. And you can add external locations. With Ente it is just about backing up your phone photos. Immich works pretty well as camera photo organizer.

The Ente desktop app has a continuous export function that’ll just dump everything into plain file directories.

It makes a little more sense when you’re using their cloud version, because otherwise you’re storing the data twice.

I'm a very happy Ente Photos user as well.

Does it have a mobile app that backs up the photos while in the background and can essentially be "forgotten"? That's pretty much what I need for my family: their photos need to get to my server magically.

Both Ente and Immich have that.

I'm also a very happy Ente user. I use Garage for its S3-like storage, with one of the nodes running on my local network (LAN). My local DNS (CoreDNS) is also configured to use this local node for the domain, which makes everything very fast.

For a general file sharing / storage solution there is also OpenCloud: https://opencloud.eu/de

It's what I want to try next. Written in go, it looks promising.

Too many Cloud things! OwnCloud, NextCloud, OpenCloud. There have* to be better names available...

Suggest one.

Have you looked into https://filebrowser.org/? While it's not drop-in replacement for Google Drive/Dropbox, it has been serving me well for similar quick usecase.

> Sadly for the general Dropbox replacement I haven't found anything either.

I had really good luck with Seafile[0]. It's not a full groupware solution, just primarily a really good file syncing/Dropbox solution.

Upsides are everything worked reliably for me, it was much faster, does chunk-level deduplication and some other things, has native apps for everything, is supported by rclone, has a fuse mount option, supports mounting as a "virtual drive" on Windows, supports publicly sharing files, shared "drives", end-to-end encryption, and practically everything else I'd want out of "file syncing solution".

The only thing I didn't like about it is that it stores all of your data as, essentially, opaque chunks on disk that are pieced together using the data in the database. This is how it achieves the performance, deduplication, and other things I _liked_. However it made me a little nervous that I would have a tough time extracting my data if anything went horribly wrong. I took backups. Nothing ever went horribly wrong over 4 or 5 years of running it. I only stopped because I shelved a lot of my self-hosting for a bit.

[0]: https://www.seafile.com/en/home/

Yeah, went with that as well. It’s blazingly fast compared to NC.

thanks for sharing. been looking for something like this for awhile

I can confirm this. We have been using it for 10 years now in our research lab. No data loss so far. Performance is great. Integration with OnlyOffice works quite well (there were sync problems a few years ago - I think upgrading OnlyOffice solved this issue).

Look into syncthing for a dropbox replacement, have been using it for years, very satisfied.

Syncthing is under my "want to like" list but I gave up on it. I'm a one person show who just wants to sync a few dozen markdown files across a few laptops and a phone. Every time I'd run it I'd invariably end up with conflict files. It got to the point where I was spending more time merging diffs than writing. How it could do that with just one person running it I have no idea.

That should not happen. I use it a lot and never had this issue, there maybe is something wrong about your setup.

A good idea is to have it on an always-on server and add your share as an encrypted one (like you set the password on all your apps but not on the server); this pretty much results in a dropbox-like experience since you have a central place to sync even when your other devices are not online

I had this when I had a windows system in the mix. Windows handles case differently in filenames than linux and macOS, and it caused conflicts.

Same. I don't know why so many people like syncthing.

I don't think that there is some good alternative to open source syncthing ,the way syncthing just does syncing no

Let me know if you know of any alternative which have helped you but I haven't tried syncthing but I have heard good things about it overall so I feel like I like it already even if I haven't tried it I guess.

My Syncthing experience matches Oxodao's. Over years with >10k files / 100 gb, I've only ever had conflicts when I actually made conflicting simultaneous changes.

I use it on my phone (configured to only sync on WiFi), laptop (connected 99% of the time), and server (up 100% of the time).

The always-up server/laptop as a "master node" are probably key.

That is good advice from both of you. I knew it has to be me because it's honestly one of the most successful and popular open source tools I've worked with. I think I should've made that more clear in my original comment.

The conflicts come of course when you edit a file on 2 devices before Syncthing had a chance to sync them. I mostly solved this by running Snycthing on a server as well as on clients, so that at least the server is always online, as a point of synchronization. So now I only get conflict files, if somehow my phone doesn't have Internet and I edit files on my phone, which happens very rarely.

If you just need a Dropbox replacement for file syncing, Nextcloud is fine if you use the native file system integrations and ignore the web and WebDAV interfaces.

I replaced all my Dropbox uses with SyncThing (and love it). I run an instance on my server at all times and on every client.

+1 for SyncThing

I have it installed on my immediate family's devices to ensure all the photos are auto-backed-up to our NAS (which is then backed up to another NAS).

I need to check to make sure it's still working once in a while (every couple of months), but it's usually fine, and even if it's somehow stopped working, getting it running again catches itself up to where it should have been anyway.

There is also "memories for nextcloud" which basically matches immich in feature set (was ahead until last month), nextcloud+memories make a very strong replacement for gdrive or dropbox

Yeah I guess my issue is that if I can't trust the mobile app not to lose my photos (or stop syncing, or not sync everything), then I just can't use it at all. There is no point in having Nextcloud AND iCloud just because I don't trust Nextcloud :D.

Nextcloud mobile app is crap but fortunately it’s just WebDAV so you can use any other WebDAV app for synchronization.

That's a good point! Are there good WebDAV apps synchronising, say the Photo gallery on iOS, transparently and always in the background?

Unfortunately Apple puts extremely strict restrictions on background tasks so you will never have something as seamless as native iCloud or the amazing Android FolderSync app that I used for realtime synchronization for several years without a single issue.

I know people work around these iOS limitations by setting up springboard widgets that piggyback on background refresh tasks to do uploads. People also create Automator actions (e.g. run every day at time or location based) in the Shortcuts app.

I haven’t tried it but a popular option on iOS seems to be: https://apps.apple.com/app/photosync-transfer-photos/id41585...

I love immich, too, but I have also ran into a lot of issues with syncing large libraries. The iPhone app will just hang sometimes.

Does it recover though, or do you end up in situations where your setup is essentially broken?

Like if I backup photos from iOS, then remove a subset of those from iOS to make space on the phone (but obviously I want to keep them on the cloud), and later the mobile app gets out of sync, I don't want to end up in a situation where some photos are on iOS, some on the cloud, but none of the devices has everything, and I have no easy way to resync them.

It won't recover unless I do something... sometimes just quitting the iPhone app and then toggling enabling backups works, but not always. I had to completely delete and reinstall the app once to get it to work, and had to resync all 45000 images/videos I had.

I have had the server itself fail in strange ways where I had to restart it. I had to do a full fresh install once when it got hopelessly confused and I was getting database errors saying records either existed when they shouldn't or didn't exist when they should.

I think I am a pretty skilled sysadmin for these types of things, having both designed and administered very large distributed systems for two decades now, but maybe I am doing things wrong, but I think there are just some gotchas still with the project.

Right, that's the kind of issues I am concerned about.

iCloud / Google Photos just don't have that, they really never lose a photo. It's very difficult for me to convince my family to move to something that may lose their data, when iCloud / Google Photos works and is really not that expensive.

It has gotten more stable as I have used it for a while. I think if you want to do it, just wait until it is stable and you have a good backup routine before relying on it.

I have found adding the following four lines to the immich proxy host in nginx proxy manager (advanced tab) solved my immich syncing issues:

client_max_body_size 50000M;

proxy_read_timeout 600s;

proxy_send_timeout 600s;

send_timeout 600s;

FWIW, my library is about 22000 items large. Hope this helps someone.

Since the last major update to 2.0, it has gotten immensely better. Whereas before the app was hung for 30 seconds on startup and would only reliably sync in the foreground for my partner, it now just works. Can open, syncs in the background. Never had such issues on my phone, probably the size of your collection matters here.

I use Syncthing as a Dropbox replacement, and I like it. I have a machine at home running it that is accessible over the net. Not the prettiest, but it works!

I too have found Syncthing + Filebrowser to be a sufficient substitute for Dropbox.

Does its iOS/Android app automatically backup the photos in the background? When I looked into Immich (didn't try it) it sounded like it was more of a server thing. I need the automation so that my family can forget about it.

I use syncthing, I've got a folder shared between my phone, laptop and media center, and it just syncs everything easily.

I do the same it's so convenient

It works well for smaller folders but it slows down to a crawl with folders that contain thousands of files. If I add a file to an empty shared folder it will sync almost instantly but if I take a photo both sides become aware of the change rather quickly but then they just sit around for 5 minutes doing nothing before starting the transfer.

how many thousands? I have a folder with a total of 12760 files spread within several folders, but the largest I think is the one with 3827 files.

I've noticed the sync isn't instantaneous, but if I ping one device from the other, it starts immediately. I think Android has some kind of network related sleep somewhere, since the two nixos ones just sync immediately.

I have around 4000 photos and videos in this folder. I don't know what it is but I know that it's not a network issue.

I think it takes a long time because the phone CPU is much slower than the desktop but I couldn't tell you what it's doing, the status doesn't say anything useful except noting that files are out of sync and that the other device is connected.

yes I do wish it would say a bit more of what's going on and have a big button that says "try it now".

I’ve tried every scheme under the sun and Immich is the only thing I’ve ever seen that actually works for this use case

Nextcloud is great, but I don't use it for backup (didn't realize it would even do that) so maybe that's why.

I use it for a family cloud service for chat, shared todo lists, shared calendar and shared editing docs (don't want to put anything private on e.g. google docs).

For all that, it's full of awesome.

For photos, you can't beat Immich.

I switch to FolderSync for the upload from mobile. Works like a charm!

I know, it sucks that the official apps are buggy as hell, but the server side is real solid

WebDAV is a nightmare, breaks when you least need it. Once I moved a few TB over it, it took a week with all the retries and troubleshooting.

As I understand it you can work around it with Nextcloud by running some other transfer service and have it watch and automatically import certain directories.

You could set up Syncthing. Once properly configured (including ignored files, that have names that cannot be handled by the backing storage or clients), you shouldn't need to touch it much.

> The majority of CEO job is excellent judgement and motivating people.

Ain't that the problem with everything. They all look good on paper until you try it for a while.

This also happened to me with my nextcloud, thankfully I did not lose any photos. I transitioned to Immich for my photos and have not looked back.

The next cloud android app is particularly bad if you use it to back up your cameras DCIM directory then you delete the photos on your phone. It overwrite the files on Nextcloud as new photos are taken. I get why this happened but it is terrible.

it's bad for everything.

i have lots of txt files on my phone which are just not synced up to my server (the files on the server are 0 byte long).

i'm using txt files to take notes because the Notes app never worked for me (I get sync errors on any android phone while it works on iphone).

Will this also happen if you let the Nextcloud app rename the files as it uploads them? I usually take that option and haven't had an issue with this although I don't have it set to delete from my phone after uploading.

All I know about Nextcloud is that HN is full of people complaining about Nextcloud

SyncThing

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