Seafile is the only good enough thing i've found so far for self-hosted file sync. But it is still a pain to upgrade the server version. nextCloud and friends is a complete disaster in my oppinion.
> nextCloud and friends is a complete disaster in my oppinion.
Why is that?
Have been using NextCloud in our company and for myself, and I couldn't be happier, no issues since 3 years, all the tools and plugins I need, sync running perfect and hassle-free and performant. I thought it's generally liked up until now - I didn't try any of the alternatives though, so they might indeed be better. Though I don't have any reason to try them tbh, as NC works almost too well.
Using Nextcloud on the web feels like a state of the art 2015 PHP web UI. It is... fine. But compare it to immich for example and they're just not playing in the same league imo
I've been using Nextcloud for years, but I've never used the web UI. Windows desktop app for syncing my Documents folder, and Android app for synchronizing a few folders on my phone, as well as the "append only" upload of my photo reel that something like SyncThing doesn't support. Works great, never had any issues with Nextcloud. The real value is in the companion apps.
I use a cron job to back up Nextcloud to B2 and S3 Glacier.
I use S3 glacier on Scaleway (European cloud provider). Storing about 3TB costs me about 7€ per month including VAT. I've had to restore 1TB in the past and it cost me around 10€. Not bad for a worst case scenario. They also do mini VPSes for 3€ per month with unlimited traffic. Really nice provider, I've used them for many years.
I've only tested partial restores from Glacier since it is expensive. I've got a raidz2 array locally as insurance against having to restore from a backup.
> A 18 Tb NAS harddrive is about 320 USD. A 2 bay unifi unas2 199. It pays off in one year. Restoring data from it is free.
That single 18TB HD is hardly safe from a disaster or even plain old hardware death, and it's a single point of failure. You need at least 3 times as many HDs to start to have something you can actually rely on to keep your data for 3-5years.
100%. Though their UI has been update a little with the last major release.
> But compare it to immich for example and they're just not playing in the same league imo
I mean, this doesn't make sense at all, tbf. They're literally not in the same league, as their targeting different use cases. Nextcloud offers a MUCH broader experience, while Immich has a very clear cut focus and does nothing outside of that. Comparing it doesn't make any sense. Except if you're actually talking about the UI exclusively. Then, yes, Immich feels much more modern and smooth.
Theres a lot of weird setup often required on the backend in my experience, but when it works, it works well. But until you get everything dialed in it can have weird issues that don't have a clear path to fix them.
It might be better in their weird AIO solution? But i dont like the idea of giving a docker container the ability to spawn more containers. I just use one of their normal docker containers and have had to manually change a lot to make it work as they actually suggest. Like just recently i setup their notify_push plugin as it improves performance - but the provided setup instructions didn't work in my setup and i had to manually tweak several things.
It took a while for me to fully set up Nextcloud with STUN/TURN, Office server, etc. in a properly containerised setup. It clearly felt like it was built before containers and modern devops approaches were a best practice.
And while community is great, I don't think Nextcloud developer community is that big and active. Their plugin system is basic, archaic, lots of things there are begging for rework.
So while Nextcloud is decent once set up, I am happy to see some fresh OSS projects solving similar issues appear. Maybe their approach will be better.
Resilio is also pretty good, depending on your use case. (Syncthing is great too, but Resilio seems faster and better at NAT traversal in my experience.)
I recently got into self-hosting Seafile and successfully set it up on my dedicated server. Had to think backup and security strategies quite a bit and ultimately I set up a bulletproof backup mechanism. Tested it pretty rigorously.
Seafile took me by surprise in terms of how quick it was at picking up new files and changes - syncing works incredibly well too. I moved all my files from my Google Drive into my Seafile instance and I'm now using it on all my devices as my main cloud storage solution.
Nextcloud suffers from flexibility, it's got a lot to offer but requires dialling in to your specific use case, the mistake most admins is to assume you can just run it without tuning, it has too many differing options to do that smoothly out of the box.
The ability to just run it in a snap has really contributed to this imho, Nextcloud is enterprise software you just happen to be able to run in your homelab.
