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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.
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 I’m stuck on a slightly out of date version because I can’t get newer ones to run.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 haven’t had any issues with Nextcloud yet. But any torrent client refuses to work. I’ve tried various qbittorrent containers, transmission, deluge briefly, they all work for a while but eventual refuse to do anything.
That sounds more like a network problem.
This got mee googling Nextcloud and I think I’m going to give it a try 😱
Seriously homie, unless you’re a fucking linux docker nerdshit wizard, you should find another way.
Thanks for the warning 🙂 Sometimes I still think I have as much spare time as 10 years ago 😉
You could be a legless NEET and not have enough time to get this fucking bullshit to work correctly.
I’ve hosted mine for years on my own bare metal Debian/Apache install and 28 is the first update that has been a major pain. I’ve had the occasional need to install a new package to enable a new feature, or needed to add new/missing indices to the database, but the web interface literally tells you how to do those things, so they’re not hard.
28 though broke several of the “featured” apps that I use regularly, like “Retention”. It also introduced some questionable UI changes that they had to fix with the recent .1 update. I’ll get occasional errors when trying to move or delete files in the web interface and everything. 28 really feels like beta software, even though we’re a point release in and I got it from the “stable” update channel.
I’ve not moved to 28 yet, might wait a bit longer from your post. My 27 is rock solid, I don’t understand why so many have issues with nextcloud.
Maybe the docker installs are pants
I’m on my laptop so I thought I would elaborate on my first comment to give you things to watch out for if/when you update. I’ve been hosting mine with the zip file manually installed with my own Apache/PHP/MySQL/MariaDB setup for ages now without issue. It’s been rock solid except for, like I said, the occasional changes required to take advantage of new features such as adding new indices to the database or installing an additional php addon. Here’s the things that I noticed with updating to 28.
- The 3 dot/ellipses menu was missing in the web interface and was replaced with dedicated buttons for “Download”, “Add to Favorites” and “Delete”. Shift clicking was also broken. This meant that when I, for example, take a lot of photos for a holiday, I can’t use the web interface to select a large range of multiple files and then move them all from “InstantUpload” into a more permanent album. I either had to use the mobile app, or do them one at a time. The ellipses menu, along with the options to bulk “move/copy” have been added back since then with the *.1 update, but shift clicking in the web interface to select a range of files is still broken.
- The “Retention” app, which is listed as a “Featured” app doesn’t function any more. I used it to automatically delete backups of my Signal messenger, files in the “InstantUpload” folder that were over a year old, etc. You can enable it, but it doesn’t actually work and just throws errors in the log file, which is now reported in the “Overview” portion of the “Administration” page with a note of “X number of errors since somedate”, and prevents you getting the green checkmark. It’s probably safe to assume that other apps will also have issues because I had half a dozen get automatically disabled with the update.
- Occasionally when I use the web interface to move or copy a file, I’ll get an error message that the operation failed. Sometimes this is true, sometimes it’s not and the operation actually succeeded. If it ends up being true and the move did actually fail, doing it again results in a successful move.
It seems like they’ve made some substantial under-the-hood changes to the user interface that shouldn’t have been shipped to the “stable” channel. It’s not completely broken, it “is” usable, especially after they restored my bulk move/copy button, but I still can’t use the Retention app, at least last time I looked, so I’ve literally got daily cron scripts to check those folders for old files and delete them, then trigger an occ files:scan of the affected directories to keep the Nextcloud database in sync with the changes. This however, bypasses the built-in trash bin so I can’t recover the files in the event of an issue. I actually considered rolling back to 27 for a bit, but decided against it, so if I were you, I would stick with 27 for a while and keep an ear to the ground regarding any issues people are having that are or aren’t getting fixed in 28.
Thanks for the heads up, will wait for 28.0.2 as that is currently cooking.
On the Retention app thing, I got into tagging to remove old backups. Will have in the morning for how I set it up
The only device running Snap in my house is a Raspberry Pi running the Snap Nextcloud and it’s rock solid.
This might be a deployment issue. How are most people running it?
I use docker and I get issues sometimes. I will admit though, when I used the snap a few years back I had no issues whatsoever.
Yeah the Docker version hated me, mainly due to it sometimes getting a bit behind on updates and then having schema mismatches if I ran an update in that missed the previous one. No issues with the Snap thus far
I used to have this problem. I started pulling a version number (like 27) instead of “latest” so that I could just pull minor releases when I did updates, and then I manually step up the version in the docker-config file for major versions when I’m ready for them. (I don’t like to pull a major release version until there’s been 1 or 2 maintenance releases since my nextcloud is fairly critical for my family)
Same with my arch install, didn’t touched it for 2 months even though laptop was turned off it decided to die when i launched it and run pacman -syu
I regularly “deep freeze” or make read-only systems from Raspberry Pi, Ubuntu, Linux Mint LMDE and others Linux Distros whereas I disable automatic updates everywhere (except for some obvious config/network/hardware/subsystem changes I control separately).
I have had systems running 24/7 (no internet, WiFi) for 2-3 years before I got around to update/upgrade them. Almost never had an issue. I always expected some serious issues but the Linux package management and upgrade system is surprisingly robust. Obviously, I don’t install new software on a old system before updating/upgrading (learned that early on empirically).
Automatic updates are generally beneficial and helps avoid future compatibility/dependency issues on active systems with frequent user interaction.
However, on embedded/single purpose/long distance/dedicated or ephemeral application, (unsupervised) automatic updates may break how the custom/main software may interact with the platform. Causing irreversible issues with the purpose it was built for or negatively impact other parts of closed circuit systems (for example: longitudinal environmental monitoring, fauna and flora observation studies, climate monitoring stations, etc.)
Generally, any kind of update imply some level of supervision and testing, otherwise things could break silently without anyone noticing. Until a critical situation arises and everything break loose and it is too late/too demanding/too costly to try to fix or recover within a impossibly short window of time.
I’d say that it’s your fault for running a system upgrade after 2 months and not expecting something to break but it’s not that unreasonable either
I disagree–a system (even Arch!) should be able to update after a couple months and not break! I recently booted an EndeavourOS image after 6 months and was able to update it properly, although I needed to completely rebuild the keyring first
I know this is how it’s supposed to be and how it should be but sadly it doesn’t always go this way and arch is notoriously known for this exact problem, the wiki itself tells you to check what’s being upgrades before doing because it might break. Arch is not stable if you don’t expect it to be unstable.
Arch and EndeavourOS are the same thing. There is no functional difference between using one or the other. They both use pacman and have the same repos.
Very true–the specific EOS repo has given me a bit of trouble in the past, but it takes like 3 commands to remove it and then you’ve got just arch (although some purests may disagree 🤣)
I’m using opensuse tumbleweed a lot - this summer I’ve found an installation not touched for 2 years. Was about to reinstall when I decided to give updating it a try. I needed to manually force in a few packages related to zypper, and make choices for conflicts in a bit over 20 packages - but much to my surprise the rest went smoothly.
The solution for me is that I run Nextcloud on a Kubernetes cluster and pin a container version. Then every few months I update that version in my deployment yaml to the latest one I want to run, and run
kubectl apply -f nextcloud.ymland it just does its thing. Never given me any real trouble.I must be in the minority. I don’t trust swarm syncing or the cloud.
I’m with you.
Local everything I possibly can.
Nextcloud can be self hosted… It’s not really “the cloud”. Can be LAN only if you want
Well… no… I have been self hosting it for several years over multiple major versions now. Only for Files, Calendar and Deck though. It was a bit hard to set up, but reading the general Apache and PHP documentation helped a lot.
The snap version of nextcloud has been pretty solid for me, except for the time that I installed the nextcloud backup app.
I’ve been updating Nextcloud in-place (manually) for multiple major versions without any flaws. What is the problem?
Yea I’ve been using nextcloud for a while and it’s fine.
I remember when I used owncloud before nextcloud was even a thing and the upgrade experience was absolute shit.
These days it’s just fine.
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.
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.
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’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.
You don’t want your kids using a rope, so keep them away from linux.
My oldest kid is a senior in highschool and is starting to show some interest in Linux and this kind of stuff. I’m hopeful that I can change my tune soon and maybe have one of the kids to share a hobby with!
If you’re ok with just file storage sftpgo has been solid for me for years now. Does sftp ftp and WebDAV (like nextcloud). Webui isn’t as pretty but it’s fast. Mobile apps will be various sync apps with sftp or WebDAV support. On Android folder sync pro is pretty good for keeping documents and pictures backed up
