A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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We welcome posts that include suggestions for good self-hosted alternatives to popular online services, how they are better, or how they give back control of your data. Also include hints and tips for less technical readers.
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If you're having issues with NextCloud being slow and having errors, it's probably because the machine you are running it on is low on RAM and/or CPU.
I bring this up because what ever replacements you try would likely have the same issues.
My NextCloud instance was nearly unusable when I had it on a Raspberry PI 3, but when I moved it to a container on my faster machine (AMD Ryzen 7 4800U with 16GB of ram) it now works flawlessly.
I agree with this. It needs a good amount of CPU cycle and RAM. Raspi struggled for me too.
My NC instance runs on a 24GB RAM, 4 CPU Ampere A1 host(Oracle), and still struggles. YMMV.
And it struggles as a photo backup host an i5-7xxx and 16GB RAM at home.
It's not absurdly slow, it's just...irritating sometimes.
The backing database type and the storage it runs on are just as important too.
What exactly have you tried to do to address your nextCloud problems?
Sorry to hear you've had a bad experience. I've been running the lsio Nextcloud docker container for 4 years without any issues at all.
For calendaring, I also went with the option of syncthing via DecSync. I can get my contacts and calendar on Android and Thunderbird, so I can avoid yet another unnecessary webapp.
I was on the same boat when I was running NC on a container. I switched to VM, and most of my issues have been resolved, but collabora. I am currently using the built-in collabora server, which is slow.
I have my issues with Nextcloud, but it's still, by far, the best solution I've come across.
Same and looking forward to the responses here. Nextcloud is too big and complicated. I deployed Immich to cover for the photo library. Still looking for a good solution for notes though.
Owncloud.
I personally never caught the Nextcloud hype, and stuck with the original. So far I've heard (and seen, having tried it twoce) nothing but trouble from Nextcloud while my Owncloud install continues to be rock solid for going on 10 years (regularly updated, of course!).
I personally never caught the Nextcloud hype
The "hype" being simply Nextcloud not being OwnCloud which turned proprietary, no?
Dunno, running my nextcloud for a long time now, even updating the lazy way over the web UI and not the suggested CLI, not even once had a problem that was Nextclouds fault.
Same. I ran OwnCloud and Nextcloud in parallel for a while until a Nextcloud update nuked it and my wife lost some of her college work.
After that I've appreciated the slower more deliberate pace of OwnCloud
This is concerning to me because I’ve been considering ditching Synology and spinning up nextcloud. I like Synology drive but I’m tired of the underpowered hardware and dumb roadblocks and vendor lock-in nonsense. I’m very curious what you end up doing!
Not OP, but I run it on docker with postgres and redis, behind a reverse proxy. All apps on NC have pretty good performance and haven't had any weird issues. It's on an old xeon with 32gb and on spinning rust.
A confirmed, yet still not resolved bug caused me and about 200 other people lose data (metadata) for tons of files. Well, at least 200 reacted to the GitHub bugreport I filled. I think you can easily find it because it's the most upvoted yet unresolved issue.
Besides this, it'd often give random errors and just not function properly. My favorites are the unexplained file locks: My brother in Christ, what do you mean error while deleting a file. It's 2023 holy shit, just delete the damn file. It's ridiculously unreliable and fragile. They have tons, thousands of bugreports open - yet they focus on pushing new, unwanted social features to become the new facebook and zoom. They definitely should focus on fixing the foundation first.
Also not OP. I run nextcloud on 10th gen i3 on spinning rust and performance is good. I run it on LXC container though so without docker
Take a look at Cloudreve
I use linuxserver.io's nextcloud docker image. While I've seen people struggle to setup Nextcloud properly to the point of just giving and installing the snap version of it, I can count the number of times I've needed to do manual interventions for nextcloud with LSIO's nextcloud image. It works like a charm.
I just installed it baremetal, works like a charm.
I open source my homelab as much as I can. But when it comes to backups of my family's photos, servers, and laptops I don't want troubleshoot bugs that could cost me valuable data and time; that's why I gladly pay for a Synology NAS.
You have not stated the hardware you are running this on. It makes a huge difference. Hope this is not Raspi?
NC on RPi 4 with 8 GB RAM works fine for me. The RPi 3 turned out to be lacking sufficient amount of RAM (1GB) after a NC version update.
PSA: saying "I run Nextcloud and don't have any problems" doesn't help anyone or contribute anything useful to the conversation. It just makes you look like an insecure fanboy.
Disagree, seeing as OP has not posted anything other than "I run Nextcloud and have problems", providing a counter is straightforward and expected.
The OP is exactly the same but in reverse. I haven't had any issues but using MariaDB instead of default SQL.
No, it makes you look insecure about your objectivity. Spreading FUD about a FOSS project isn't helpful, and it's usually down to misconfiguration or poor hardware that it doesn't run properly.
I see plenty of folks who think they've got Redis setup but are following crap guides, so it isn't working.
If you are willing to consider commercial products, I can recommend Synology DiskStations (at least the plus series). Samba shares are quite easy to setup, you can use Synology Drive to sync a folder between workstations and Android phones which I use for Obsidian for note taking. They also have calendar options, but I use a hosted account at posteo for that.
If you want to stick to nextcloud but don't want to host it, you could consider Hetzner Storage Share. It's fully managed and worked great for me so far. But I only use it to share photos with others, so not all features.
Sorge Hetzner Storage Share is what I now use as a "rock solid" Nextcloud. It's slow as fuck since I activated like all plugins but - hypothetically they let you run those small llms for a Local AI integration meaning you could do a lot for those few bucks.
However, long term, I having setup Nextcloud AIO and so far I did one upgrade without any issues. This Nextcloud could be fast - but is not slow running on 150gb RAM and 6 vCPUs. It would take more RAM if I give it more......but I have a full stack NC with Talk,ClamAV, Talk Record, .....
I like the look of filerun - but it's not free in the community edition anymore. So what I am looking into for a time but could not figure to setup is Pydio.
Did you tried installing it with snap?
Its just snap install nextcloud and you are done. No config no manual updates and iam having a good time with it. It was a bit tricky to change the main storage folder to another hdd, but its possible.
That maybe fix your Performance issues too if there is something configured wrong, in the other hand snap is a bit slower then a normal install.
Perhaps you need something to trigger the webcron so things don’t slow down to a crawl. I use uptime Kuma to trigger the webcron every five minutes and have never had any issues.
Notes: Memos
Calendar: still Nextcloud (caldav is fast enough in nextcloud, even with sqlite) or SOGo
Files: Owncloud OCIS (not the old PHP one)
Trillium , file browser
Sadly there is no real alternative right now if you want anything close to what the cloud providers do. Synthing is the only thing I use that comes close to parts of it. Nextcloud is just a slow insecure mess.
I used NC with postgresql, apps works fine and pretty smooth in everything. Compared to mysql it definitely feel faster.
But now I have no use for NC, I installed File Browser for file exploring. Super simple web file browser.
Focalboard, for kanban.
Obsidian with sync.
Next cloud must be the worst piece of shit ever
I never stop seeing people complain about it :(
It sounds like the sync aspect was written by the crash plan folks.
Try Nextcloud-AIO and install the Preview Generator as well. (note that you will need to run it manually the first time). I did struggle as well, before I found the AIO. Now I'm happy. :-)
This is where I am right now as well. The main thing (or really the only thing in fact) I use nextcloud for now is file storage, because when it works, it works damn well. I only really need something that can upload and download files easily, which I guess there are alternative for that, but I also need to be able to share the files via link and share links where other people can upload files for me, which so far Nextcloud does the best of the bunch I've tried... So I'm kinda stuck on the decision to switch for now...
Filebrowser for files, Trillium for notes
Sounds like you need a Synology NAS...
I don't know of any decent calendar sync. DecSync seems pretty abandoned.
Just came to say I self host baikal too for calendar and address book / tasks
use DavX on my Android phone to keep it in sync and thunderbird on the computer