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Setting up your own Nextcloud instance to get off of Google

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Re: Setting up your own Nextcloud instance to get off of Google

#121

Post by johnchristopher »

627467 wrote: post #76
acquacow wrote: post #56

Setup nextcloud 2 years ago as part of a FreeNAS install. It runs in a jail and dumps my files to the local, shared filesystem as a result. I also put the nextcloud clients on my phone so that my photos auto-upload to my NAS vs google photos. It's been quite nice to be able to just drop files to it, right click, then share someone a link to those files.

Is this hosted on dynamic IP? How do you handle that so mobile clients can auto-upload to the server?

There are two options I think: a VPN or a dynamic DNS like duckdns.

Re: Setting up your own Nextcloud instance to get off of Google

#122

Post by shimonabi »

I use Nextcloud for the calendar, the to-do deck and to access my Samba shares over HTTPS.

That said, I would never put anything important on it. I had at least 5 upgrades in the past 2 years result in total failure, with an unrecoverable instance and corrupted DB.

Re: Setting up your own Nextcloud instance to get off of Google

#123

Post by johnchristopher »

gorgonzolachz wrote: post #101
bilal4hmed wrote: post #25

I'm glad some of yall are mentioning cost. These articles while awesome usually don't mention the cost to operate and support such endeavors. I would like to host my own Matrix instance, but I have no idea what the cost would be monthly.

Synapse is essentially invisible on a $5/mo digitalocean VM, in my experience. I don't have too many people on it, but I've run my own server for about a year and a half now and I've had no issues whatsoever. Throw it on a VM if you have one lying around, and if not you can always spin up a new one and use it for any other services you want to host in the future.

It was fine for me until I federated and the avatar folder grew over the gigabyte because joining another room triggers the downloading and caching of pictures and there are no thumbnails.

Re: Setting up your own Nextcloud instance to get off of Google

#124

Post by KronisLV »

nicbou wrote: post #119

I would strongly advise against nextcloud. I installed it for about 8 months before giving up. I spent too many nights getting it to work properly, and recovering from various failures. I never felt safe putting my data on it. In my opinion, Nextcloud favours quantity over quality, and many of its core features are subpar. Upgrades are messy, and the docker images fail at reproducible builds. The android client is al…

I actually recently encountered issues which broke the system, when attempting to upgrade between major versions. I wrote about it briefly on my blog, as incomplete as it may be, here: https://blog.kronis.dev/everything%20is%20broken/nextcloud-i...

In summary:

- Nextcloud failed to update from the version 17 to 20 - it did inform me that it can't do this, but not before attempting to update the version number and essentially breaking itself. That said, other software, such as phpBB is also known for brittle updates between major versions.

- After a re-install of the latest version, it failed to allow clients to connect to it through HTTPS (reverse proxy setup), though this proved to be a problem in the default configuration.

- It then also failed to synchronize all of my files once i dumped them into the sync folder, though that's a lesser issue.

- The new Talk ( https://nextcloud.com/talk/ ) application is enabled by default and for some reason noticeably slowed down the whole system, even when not in active use - page loads went from 1-2 seconds to approx. 3-10.

Despite all of that, i would still recommend Nextcloud, because there isn't much software like it out there, and when it works, it is actually pretty okay.

Provided you follow these suggestions:

- Always have working backups. I personally use BackupPC ( https://backuppc.github.io/backuppc/ ) which i self-host, cloud vendors also offer managed options.

- Stick to a single major version, update manually. In the case of Docker, i just stick to a particular image tag, such as :20.0.2-apache.

- When updating, have the backups ready and be prepared to wipe and reinstall the application. Never store anything in Nextcloud that you're not prepared to have unavailable for a while. As for the apps (like Talk or Calendar), where you can't export the data to later import it, be prepared to lose it, or use another alternative.

Sadly this will mean that for a while your instance will be insecure, but the current circumstances force me to prefer working software over secure software.

Re: Setting up your own Nextcloud instance to get off of Google

#125

Post by hda111 »

nr2x wrote: post #42

I had a few instances of OwnCloud and various NAS setups over the years. Then I had a kid and dumped everything into iCloud when I realized I’d no longer have time to keep it all secure/patched. Time cost of these setups is real.

Snap has auto update. So this shouldn’t be a problem here. Only the restarts are manual (to apply the update).

Re: Setting up your own Nextcloud instance to get off of Google

#126

Post by nicbou »

KronisLV wrote: post #124
nicbou wrote: post #119

I would strongly advise against nextcloud. I installed it for about 8 months before giving up. I spent too many nights getting it to work properly, and recovering from various failures. I never felt safe putting my data on it. In my opinion, Nextcloud favours quantity over quality, and many of its core features are subpar. Upgrades are messy, and the docker images fail at reproducible builds. The android client is al…

I actually recently encountered issues which broke the system, when attempting to upgrade between major versions. I wrote about it briefly on my blog, as incomplete as it may be, here: https://blog.kronis.dev/everything%20is%20broken/nextcloud-i... In summary: - Nextcloud failed to update from the version 17 to 20 - it did inform me that it can't do this, but not before attempting to update the version number and ess…

I had exactly the same issue last week!

https://nicolasbouliane.com/blog/nextcloud-docker-upgrade-er...

However, this is the straw that broke the camel's back:

https://github.com/nextcloud/docker/issues/420#issuecomment-...

Re: Setting up your own Nextcloud instance to get off of Google

#127

Post by KronisLV »

nicbou wrote: post #126
KronisLV wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually recently encountered issues which broke the system, when attempting to upgrade between major versions. I wrote about it briefly on my blog, as incomplete as it may be, here: https://blog.kronis.dev/everything%20is%20broken/nextcloud-i... In summary: - Nextcloud failed to update from the version 17 to 20 - it did inform me that it can't do this, but not before attempting to update the version number and ess…

I had exactly the same issue last week! https://nicolasbouliane.com/blog/nextcloud-docker-upgrade-er... However, this is the straw that broke the camel's back: https://github.com/nextcloud/docker/issues/420#issuecomment-...

Huh, the idea of manually downgrading the version number seems like a nice hack!

It does feel kind of unfortunate, however, that while containers themselves are immutable most of the time, the tags themselves will point to different images over time.

If you do want something like a rolling release model, where you always use ":latest" (or ":master" or ":trunk", or ":stable" or whatever), then it feels like you'd need to constantly pull the latest versions of the image, with something like shepherd for Swarm ( https://github.com/djmaze/shepherd ), watchtower for regular Docker ( https://github.com/containrrr/watchtower ) or whatever the Kubernetes alternative is.

The whole DB user thing feels unfortunate, however! Especially on systems, where you have a single "fat" DB instance which is shared amongst different pieces of software (with separate schemas for each), as opposed to a more distributed approach, where each DB instance is separate and used by only one application.

Personally i've come to use the latter approach and run all of my DBs as containers, with bind-mounted /var/lib/$DATA_DIRECTORY_FOR_DB_HERE directories, for easier data backups. Though i guess that's also in part because i want to cap the resources available to each instance and also because i don't trust any piece of software to let it impact others in a shared resource situation.

Re: Setting up your own Nextcloud instance to get off of Google

#128

Post by Netcob »

I've been using Nextcloud for a few years now, starting with my mail-in-a-box instance. Before that, I played around with owncloud a bit over the years.

I'm now at the point where I'm trying to find a different solution. I don't even use all the web UI stuff, but desktop sync is unusable to me now. It all started a few months ago when the new desktop client version came out, and would always crash when opening that new view. When it was updated on the server side, I started getting signed out every time I shut down one of the computers I'm using, which gets especially frustrating on the computer where I'm using two nextcloud accounts, because I have to log in, wait 30s because apparently there are bad logins from my IP (??), grant access, log out, log in with the other account, grant access again, and then do the same dance again on the next computer I start. And ever since I've been using it, I kept getting "undefined states" and weird database errors.

It just seems like they don't do a lot of testing and focus more on features than stability. Any suggestions for a very stable open source service hosted in linux that does good desktop sync with a windows client?

Re: Setting up your own Nextcloud instance to get off of Google

#130

Post by opinologo »

shimonabi wrote: post #122

I use Nextcloud for the calendar, the to-do deck and to access my Samba shares over HTTPS. That said, I would never put anything important on it. I had at least 5 upgrades in the past 2 years result in total failure, with an unrecoverable instance and corrupted DB.

I'm curious about this.

I used Nextcloud for a few years already and never, ever I had a corrupted DB in any of the upgrades.

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