In my own personal experience, Nextcloud;
- Needs constant attention to prevent falling over
- Administration is a mess
- Takes far too long to get used to its ‘little ways’
- Basics like E2EE don’t work
- Sync works when it feels like it
- Updating feels like russian roulette
None. I don’t make a habit of keeping “misbehaving” apps around. If I can’t get to the bottom of a specific issue that app is getting the boot from my stable.
This has been a serious concern of mine. In the event that I prematurely die I have everything set up with automatic updates, so that hopefully my family can continue to use the self-hosted services without me.
Nextcloud will not stop shitting the bed. I’d give it a few months at most if I died, at which point my family would likely turn back to Google Drive.
I’m looking for a more reliable alternative, even if it’s not as feature-rich.
I’ve told my wife and family that if something happens to me, they need to start migrating all their stuff off my self-hosted services to cloud services because its a matter of time before something fails and nobody’s around who knows or cares to fix it.
The way that they do updates doesn’t make automated updates very easy. There are usually a few little nagging things that have to be done or changed and they don’t always seem to be the same. I just update manually and make sure I’ve got a good backup of all my family’s files.
I really don’t understand all those posts: I use nginx, apparmor, partially even modsecurity, I use collabora office official debian package, face recognition, email, update regularly (waiting for major upgrades for every app I use to be updated), etc. and literally never had a problem in the last 5 years except for my own experiment. True, only 5 people use my instance, but Nextcloud is rock solid for me
Likewise. I have been running it for years, almost no problem that I can think of. My setup is pretty vanilla, Apache, MySQL. It’s running in a container behind a reverse proxy. I keep it as up to date as possible. Only 3 people use mine, and I don’t use very many apps: files, notes, bookmarks, calendar, email.
Nextcloud has been super solid for me using the official docker image.
I’ve been updating Nextcloud in-place (manually) for multiple major versions without any flaws. What is the problem?
Only complaints I have with Nextcloud are that it’s slow and updates suck over the web interface. But apart from that it has been reliable. I’m not running it through Docker. In fact, my installation is so old that the database tables still have an
oc_prefix.You might want to try migrating your nextcloud instance to postgres instead of mysql/mariadb. Many people says they get some big performance boost. I’m going to try it myself next weekend to see if it’s true.
They don’t anymore? XD
I wish there were an alternative in a sane programming language that I could actually contribute to. For some reason PHP is extremely sparse in its logging and errors mostly only pop up on the frontend. Having to debug errors after an update and following some guide to edit a file in the live env that sets a debugging variable, puts the system in maintenance mode and stores additional state in the DB is scary.
Plus PHP is so friggin slow. Nextcloud takes noticeable time to load nearly anything. Even instances hosted by pros that only host nextcloud are just slow.
You could check out Frappe Drive (and Frappe, the framework it’s built on, it’s pretty awesome). They aren’t accepting contributions at the moment but I’m sure that’ll change once it’s out of beta like with the other frappe apps. There’s also Raven messenger also built on Frappe and you can use the two together (but without any real integration between the two yet, but that’s on the roadmap on the Raven side).
I’ve spent a lot of time researching alternatives and NextCloud is the only one that does everything it does in one place. I’ve dug into the code a lot to find places to make it work faster and came out confused and mostly empty. It’s also federated, and I think it’s the only FOSS file sharing platform that is. It’'s a very mature application so you’ll be hard pressed to find features that are missing, but also to find things that could be further optimized without ripping out major chunks of the application which are likely interconnected with other major chunks of the application. For my personal use NextCloud instance I’ve resorted to just completely deleting the database and installing everything fresh between major versions, then just rescanning my local folder.
The new Linuxserver.io docker image at the very least has solved the annoying update cycle NextCloud has and seems to have fixed the need to do that every few months. I haven’t ever had it die but I don’t push it hard and I keep the plugins to a minimum because I just don’t trust it and it doesn’t run all that well.
I’ve just finally and fully spun down a proxmox server I’ve been running and updating as my home lab for six years.
Every major update seemed to break something. Upgrades were always a roll of the dice as to whether it would even boot. It’s probably at least partially my fault for using an old R710 and running docker directly on the OS instead of within a container, but it was still by far my least reliable piece of kit.
The last
apt updateremovedsudo, and I can’t be arsed to rebuild, so I’ve moved the critical bits to a fleet of SBCs. Powering that fucker down was a huge relief.Perhaps ironically, lemmy. I had the database catastrophically fail early on, and ever since then federation has been broken with most major instances. I kind of prefer lotide anyway, much more minimalistic, less of a focus on upvotes and downvotes, and the code base is simply enough that I’ve been able to hop into it and make changes.
I won’t update without first creating an image of the server to roll back to. Like others on here, the web updater almost always fails and goes into maintenance mode and I have to ssh in to fix it.
Having said that, functionally, I have no issues. Only when upgrading does the whole thing shit the bed.
I gave up on owncloud just before it became nextcloud because it kept breaking every time I updated it.
Wallabag is similar for me now. I’m stuck on a slightly out of date version because I can’t get newer ones to run. Everything else I self host is painless though.
I’ve been running nextcloud since before it was nextcloud. Was owncloud then moved to next cloud.
Another user put it best. It always feels 75% complete. Sync isn’t fast, gives errors that self correct when restarting the all. Most plugins are even more janky or feel super barren.
I wanted to like it so much but I stopped being able to trust most plugins which meant I had dedicated apps for those things and used nextcloud only for file sync.
If you only want file sync then seafile is vastly superior so that’s what I now have.
The problem child for me right now is a game built in node.js that I’m trying to host/fix. It’s lagging at random with very little reason, crashing in new and interesting ways every day, and resisting almost all attempts at instrumentation & debugging. To the point most things in DevTools just lock it up full stop. And it’s not compatible with most APMs because most of the traffic occurs over websockets. (I had Datadog working, but all it was saying was most of the CPU time is being spent on garbage collection at the time things go wonky–couldn’t get it narrowed down, and I’ve tried many different GC settings that ultimately didn’t help)
I haven’t had any major problems with Nextcloud lately, despite the fragile way in which I’ve installed it at work (Nextcloud and MariaDB both in Kubernetes). It occasionally gets stuck in maintenance mode after an update, because I’m not giving it enough time to run the update and it restarts the container and I haven’t given enough thought to what it’d take to increase that time. That’s about it. Early on I did have a little trouble maintaining it because of some problems with the storage, or the database container deciding to start over and wipe the volume, but nothing my backups couldn’t handle.
I have a hell of a time getting the email to stay working, but that’s not necessarily a Nextcloud problem, that’s a Microsoft being weird about email problem (according to them it is time to let go of ancient apps that cannot handle oauth2–Nextcloud emailer doesn’t support this, same with several other applications we’re running, so we have to do some weird email proxy stuff)
I am not surprised to hear some of the stories in this thread, though. Nextcloud’s doing a lot of stuff. Lots of failure points.
