[Eric_WVGG]

The recent changes to Dropbox incited me to finally build a home NAS/personal-cloud server based on Nextcloud last month.

My first impressions were a bit negative, as I was expecting "open source Dropbox" and nothing more; Nextcloud actually does quite a lot, which made me think it was bloatware. This is due to my ignorance and jumping in too fast.

What Nextcloud actually is: a personal Dropbox-style server, with open source equivalents of Google Docs, calendaring, contacts, notepads, and a complete "app store". It's all really well built, and you can use as much (or in my case, as little) as you feel like. I thought I'd use none of these apps at all, until I realized that I would really like a Del.icio.us-style [bookmarking app](https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/bookmarks), but had no desire to shop around and adopt something that required a fee or might disappear later.

At this point, my only criticisms are that I think the installation should be more idiot-friendly, and the UI smells of 2012.

For anyone interested in following suit, I picked up an [Odroid-HC1](https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-hc1-home-cloud-one/) (a bit like a Raspberry Pi, but much higher disk and network performance, at a similar price point) and [NextcloudPi](https://ownyourbits.com/nextcloudpi/#download) (complete Debian + Nextcloud image). It went swimmingly and cost well under a hundred bucks, not counting the 3.5" hard drive.

Nextcloud is backed by a corporation that mostly makes its money off support for the German gov't? I think it's an ideal solution for any municipality, non-profit, or small-to-large sized company that for whatever reason doesn't want to go with a commercial cloud.

[choward]

> At this point, my only criticisms are that I think the installation should be more idiot-friendly, and the UI smells of 2012.

I agree about the installation but what's a good solution? If you're self-hosting something (at home) there are two main problems you need to solve. You need to be able to access it from the internet and you need a backup strategy. I would argue that an install isn't complete unless you have those and they aren't easy to automate.

As for the UI, I agree. It's pretty blah. But I would take that over pretty much all of the recent garbage UIs that are more catered to making money instead of improving the UX.

[Eric_WVGG]

I guess the fact that 80% of the installation is as good as it is makes me frustrated about the last 20%.

One example: the install expects that the data drive will be on a 1-2gb USB attached storage drive; the Odroid uses SATA, 6tb drives are very commonplace, and the process for formatting <4 | >4gb is apparently completely different in Linux?

To reiterate, the installer is really good, but someone stopped just short of making it great.

Regarding the UI, it's not terrible, but I hope that Nextcloud Corp invests some of their newly found riches on a top-class UX designer.

[Doxin]

> the process for formatting <4 | >4gb is apparently completely different in Linux?

It's different for any OS. A good tool hides that from the user, but it's as true for Windows as it is for Linux.

[jancborchardt]

> At this point, my only criticisms are that I think the installation should be more idiot-friendly, and the UI smells of 2012.

One of the Nextcloud designers here – thank you for the honest feedback! :)

Could you share some more details on these two things specifically? - Where did you have issues with the installation? On the website, download, permissions, install page, etc.? - Which parts of the UI you see as outdated? Is it the web interface, specific apps, the desktop client, the mobile apps, all of it? Any specific things which seem off to you and we should focus on?

We continuously work on improving the design of course. As it is we are not so many designers, as unfortunately the problem is in open source. Also we’ve been working on many things in parallel like accessibility, standardization, the new Vue components, and of course our breadth of apps, etc.

So thanks for bringing this up! We’ll do better.

[derefr]

More obvious comparisons to Nextcloud are Synology's DiskStation Manager (the OS that runs on any Synology NAS device), and Apple's Server.app. Both aim to provide the same sort of "SME Intranet Services in-a-box" experience. (Just, neither are FOSS; both are platform-locked.)

[Aeolun]

To give the opposite view, my experience with Nextcloud was a disaster.

The setup was painful, the UI would randomly not respond to my requests, and in general it just felt like a bad PHP hobby project.

Then to top it off their sync client basically deleted half of my photo collection for some reason, and nobody seemed to have any idea why, in general adopting a ‘that sometimes happens, just reset the sync client’ stance.

I mean, that’s cool, but meanwhile it’d synched the deletion across all my machines.

Thankfully I had everything still synched to Google Drive as well, but I need to be able to trust my sync client.

[jeena]

Sadly this happened to me to, I synced the deletion of my complete music library to all the devices. Lucky my that I had the CDs and download codes from the vinyls, but it was quite some work to get it back.

Since then I use NextCloud for calendar and addressbook sync, notes sync and a browser mail frontend if I'm not on any of my own computers.

[m463]

I tried setting up owncloud/nextcloud a few times and always had trouble. I did try nextcloudpi (but I can't recall the problems I had)

Eventually I did get it going with Ubos on a raspberry pi 3 booting from a fast sandisk cz80 usb flash drive. Ubos under the covers is based on arch linux.

It was pretty straightforward to set up.

I then installed nextcloud apps for iOS and Mac OS.

It is nice -- it does files, contacts, calendars, photos, etc.

Then I didn't touch anything. It works, although I'm at least a year out of date, but everything is stable and all my stuff syncs back and forth.

[glup]

I have used Nextcloud for about two years and really like it as well; the only problem I have encountered is that the client sometimes slows down my OS X machine and it's not clear how to proceed in debugging the client.

[secfirstmd]

Does Nextcloud have end to end encryption on it yet? I'm a fan of it but until it does I might wait

[Eric_WVGG]

Yup. https://nextcloud.com/blog/nextcloud-13-brings-secure-file-s...

[jospoortvliet]

Sadly it's still in testing, but we (finally) managed to hire a 2nd developer so we're moving forward... 3rd job position is still open so if you're in C++ or know somebody who is - let them mail us!

[addicted]

Thanks for sharing this. I've been interested in creating my own setup, and I was wondering if you've setup an off-prem backup solution, and what you're using for that?

[glup]

I have a cron job that copies the internal drive to an (encrypted) USB drive every night, and about every 3 months I sneakernet it to an offsite location (eg my parents' house in another state) and bring back the previously-stashed drive. It's nice to know my data is in multiple places I trust, and not plugged in. I also do a lot of digital photography (~1TB/year) so it's cheaper than cloud solutions (at least last I checked)

[Eric_WVGG]

Not yet. Currently living on the edge with a USB backup drive. I’d like to offload to Amazon Glacier but waiting for a rainy day to sort out IAM nonsense.