Nextcloud VS NextCloudPi

If complete self-hosting is a must, I now need some file server capable of generating shareable links, to be used in my Markdown image components. In summary, Syncthing is great for Dropbox-style backups, but can't share links, NextCloud is too resource-heavy and Seafile is interesting but apparently has proprietary encryption, which left me with the lightweight Filebrowser

In my opinion it’s not a good alternative if you or your team members expect exactly the same quality of service. When you switch to Nextcloud you’ll have to expect more bugs, less reliability, less performance and obviously more maintenance (since it's typically self-hosted) compared to Google Drive, Dropbox or One Drive. So you'll have to go into this with a different kind of mindset. What you gain is independence and extendability due to a rather big platform ecosystem.

E.g. here are some specific things and examples of things you'll have to deal with, in no specific order. These are just some things I've had to deal with recently.

- You'll have to educate people in your group that there are at least 3 different ways to share files among each other and that they can all coexist in parallel (Individual Shares vs. Group Shares vs. Group folders vs. Circles/Teams) (I did a german blog post on this: https://bitbetter.de/blog/nextcloud-freigabe-chaos/)

- Handling of file/folder names with special characters is a mess e.g. if you have Windows and Linux clients there will most certainly be conflicts. (Luckily this has been fixed recently by the `forbidden_filename_characters` config option – which is not enforced yet via the Web UI) see https://github.com/nextcloud/ios/issues/2802

- Creating Nextcloud users with spaces in their names, will break CalDAV on iOS Devices (https://github.com/nextcloud/server/issues/15641)

- Nextcloud (aka Collabora) Office is very slow if you want to actually work collaboratively with it (no matter the power of your Collabora server) – unfortunately it's no match for Google Docs or Office 365

See Configuration and syntax changes and Special packages. The latter this time includes changes around PostgreSQL, which should be upgraded to 16.1.

Nextcloud——File Sharing and Collaboration Platform

Website: Nextcloud

It really is hard to leave Gmail when all of your data has been conveniently stored therein. This is one of Google's retention strategies and it is indeed brilliant.

That said, there's a vast number of self-hosted alternatives like Stalwart Mail (email) [1], Immich (images) [2], NextCloud (Google Docs) [3], etc.

[1] https://stalwa.rt

[2] https://immich.app

[3] https://nextcloud.com/

nextcloudpi.com

It works great and is reasonably fast if you connect it over ethernet. If you have a newer firmware, which has already enabled the boot from SSD on your pi it is super easy (otherwise just Google how to set up boot from ssd with a microSD). Afterwards you can use the raspberry pi flashing tool to flash the image of nextcloudpi on your ssd. This includes the 64bit raspberry pi OS, a running Nextcloud instance and some other handy tools (like help to set up security features). The first setup can be done with the IP adress of your Pi in an internet browser of a device in your network. Here is the link to the image of NextcloudPi https://github.com/nextcloud/nextcloudpi

Issue 2 still persists and after digging around found this issue reported on git https://github.com/nextcloud/nextcloudpi/issues/1752 but cant figure out how to sort it

Install nextcloudpi (https://github.com/nextcloud/nextcloudpi) Install Nextcloud app on your phone.

If you want to update faster than the docker image is published, you'll have to build the image locally: https://github.com/nextcloud/nextcloudpi

My best experience in out of the box comes from Nextcloudpi: https://nextcloudpi.com/

Nextcloud is functionally similar to Dropbox, Office 365 or Google Drive but is self-hosted so you are in control of your data. This version is a lightly-forked version of NextCloudPi, which was developed for SBCs like the Raspberry Pi. Only a few changes from upstream and some SysV initscripts were required to get this working nicely in Linux Deploy.