6d ago

Started hosting my own Nextcloud and its awesome!

So the last month or so I have started the slow transition of deGoogling and other efforts... its scary because I've been using Google for 20 years. But I have jumped into the deep end with NextCloud and I cannot believe this is free. My only wish is that it was easier so that everyone could do it. It's pretty complicated but at the same time, so worth it to learn how!

If you have a web server and any experience managing hosted tools like Wordpress at all I highly recommend NextCloud. It's free software (you'd pay for hosting though...) and can replace all your Google producs and more: Gmail, Calendar, Tasks, Meet, Docs/Drive, Photos, Keep, Contacts, Google forms, Doodlepoll, Docusign, and more. It's even got a pretty cool self-hosted maps tool, but I haven't really played with the viability of replacing Google Maps with that yet. It's also got a self-hosted password manager, a recipe keeper and bookmarks manager if you want it (and more.)

Self hosing NextCloud has a steep learning curve if you're a beginner, but you can do it. The support community is pretty responsive and engaged. If you don't want to do it yourself, there are service providers who will host and support it for you with little effort from you, but that would remove the self-hosted data benefit (although most are data privacy centered).

31 comments

I’m going to say this now before anything happens: backup, backup, and backup. Make multiple copies, store them different places. Please dear god backup your data, because no one else will.
- Then make sure you can actually restore the data.
  
  I must be stupid, could you elaborate?
  Just went thru a big (unrelated) homelab restore
- Had my first need to do a backup last night for my self-hosted VPS. It was a bit sad I had to, but I was glad it was there. Now I'm trying to figure out how to do it for my microPC-turned-mini-server.
  
  I run proxmox on my server, VMs within that. It has an excellent backup service built in (not the proxmox backup server, that’s separate) that you can set a schedule for and it keeps to it. Very customizable, all my backups (tested monthly) have restored fine for the past few years. If you’re looking for something to run your homelab, I highly recommend it.

I do use nextcloud for my small consultancy team but I dislike it immensely, mostly due to personal preferences.
I think I pretty much just don't like having one platform that does everything. I want to self host my own cloud, I don't want to self host a thing that provides a cloud.
Additionally, and this really is just a personal preference, I dislike php projects almost as much as Java.
Primarily I use nextcloud's file sync. This aspect is IMO extremely well implemented. It seems to work very reliably.
We do use contacts and calendars. If there were good alternatives I would switch to them but sabreDav et al lacks a good UI. I'm aware you can disable this functionality in nextcloud.
Anything else that can potentially be integrated is better hosted separately IMO.
- It's definitely a bit of a behemoth, and the dated php codebase doesn't really help either. I set up OpenCloud last week and aside from the struggle getting it working with a single compose and Authentik for OIDC, it's been exactly what I've been looking for. Simpler, faster, and only does the things I need it to do.
  
  I'm also eyeing at oxicloud that uses rust, haven't tried yet, and it's still in development for extra features
- I don't remember if it was next or owncloud, but one of them was making a rewrite in go. I'm I'm no rush to jump into it, but keep a eye on it.
  
  Owncloud had a rewrite called oCIS (Owncloud Infinite Scale). Then it was bought by Kiteworks. Then many of the core devs switched to a new product/company called Opencloud. There's been quite some history over the past few years
- I agree about separating the services. In the past I had problems upgrading owncloud/nextcloud with too many plugins. It was difficult to keep all data between the versions.
  Now I'm using Baikal for calendar/contacts, Silverbullet for notes and Linkding for bookmarks.
  Currently I use these services by VPN only, so file sharing isn't really useful. I could reach all my files there by SMB and I don't dare to provide my services openly. For that alone Nextcloud was great, but I don't trust my setup enough to share it with the world again.
- I agree that the file sync is good. They (and owncloud afaik) are the only ones supporting virtual files on windows where you only download files when needed, saving storage space.
  I suppose these fancy file features (bidirectional syncing, advanced conflict resolution etc) are targeted to the enterprise, not home users. So it's natural they'd include it with a bunch of bells and whistles that are half as good

Too many people complain that nextcloud has too many functions.

The RSS reader is pretty good too!

I've been using Nextcloud since it forked from OwnCloud (... and used OwnCloud before that). It's gone from a VPS, to bare metal on dedicated hosting, and now self hosted as a docker container because we've finally got fibre internet.
I've got around 6TB or so hosted for my small business, with shared directories for different levels of file access, shared contact lists, shared calendars, and a publicly accessible area for things like email attachments (works with a Thunderbird plugin to automatically host and link large attachments with a password) and uploads from customers (they can only upload, no viewing or deleting).
It's incredible, and I've never had the issues people complain so much about. The worst I ever experienced was using snap and occasionally an automatically updated version simply wouldn't work... So I'd just roll back to the last version and manually update a few months later when I remembered.
Currently using the Nextcloud AIO docker image which includes Borg backups. They get stored on another disk to Nextcloud, which gets automatically backed up to Crashplan.

I've been using it for many years (since 2017ish) and it's awesome for my small group. We don't use fancy stuff, just sharing internal files and external links.
I've been using it with NextcloudPi and recently switched to YunoHost and it's way better. If you have a small server and not much technical knowledge, you should check it.
- YUNOhost FTW!
  I would never have gotten into self-hosting without it.

Been using Nextcloud for more than a year now, and I honestly like that the functionalities are pretty similar to Google Workspace. I mainly use it for backing up my files (and share the files with anyone if they want to see the file, rather than going through Google Drive every time), and storing contacts and calendars there too. Though honestly, I didn’t know there’s similar Docusign and Doodlepoll there, so I shall take a look some time.

Despite it getting a bit of a scattered mess, I still love Nextcloud as it can pretty much provide everything I want in a cloud service. Currently running via a yunohost setup because upgrading is way, way easier but I might migrate it to a truenas setup OR a docker container just because. The advantage of going truenas is that it is my main storage system with backup etc. but the disadvantage is if something goes wrong (I do have a backup to the backups ahem and it does have raidz1 so I should be resistant to some errors)
\ We shall see....

Before you get too far, consider setting up users with a domain like Samba-Domain. This way you get centralized user management for anything you decide to host alongside it.
Also, ZFS is great for backups.
Are you using/going to use LibreOffice or OnlyOffice? Libre is more popular, but Only was built for web and has better MS compatibility.
- A full-blown samba domain is extremely overkill if you don't have a fleet of windows machines.
  You can get centralized user management with a simple LDAP server or similar, no need for a domain.
  Also, snapshots-based backups have limited uses (can't easily restore only a single file, eats quite a bit of storage). The only times where I actually needed backups were because I fucked up a single application or database, don't want to rollback the whole OS/data drive for that.
  
  Samba-Domain is extremely lightweight, surfaces LDAP and AD, and can manage Linux and mac laptops, not just Windows. I wouldnt call it overkill.
  Also, restoring single files from a snapshot is simple, I don't get this? Lastly, of your whole data drive is one dataset in ZFS, you are ZFSing wrong.

My Nextcloud AIO :)

Welcome to the fold.
Been running nextcloud for 8+ years. Love the auto upload and bookmark sharing apps.
The contacts and calendar apps support DAV....I use DAVx on android to sync contacts and calendar to nextcloud ....haven't sync'd to Google. Grab it from FDroid. I have an article on my web blob explaining how to do it.
Remember to backup your cloud data and secure your web portal or run over private vpn.
Oh and go find the php updater script...it's a life saver.

Congrats! Just FYI,I've had a couple of plugins mess up my installations a couple of times. So I'll mirror what others say and set up a backup if you haven't already.

I've run Nextcloud several ways, the smoothest, easiest and most powerful being the official image by Hanssen IT. Run that in a VM and use their setup/update scripts to do all the hard work. I highly recommend.

31 comments