this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2024
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[–] [email protected] 91 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (7 children)

No if I have to keep fixing it , it is not worth my time.

I installed owncloud years ago and came to the same conclusion and just got rid of it. I use syncthing nowadays though its not the same thing.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Yep, I've adapted all of my setup to syncthing, and never looked back.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Any guidance on this? I looked into Synthing at one time to backup Android phones and got overwhelmed very quickly. I'd love to use it in a similar fashion to NextCloud for syncing between various computers too.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Well, it works in a different way than NextCloud. You don't have a server, instead you just make a share between your computers and they are all peers.

It takes some getting used to the idea, but it's actually much simpler than NextCloud.

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[–] [email protected] 58 points 11 months ago (4 children)

I dunno what you guys are doing that makes your nextcloud die without touching it. Mine runs happily until I decide to update it, and that usually goes fine, too. I don't use docker for it, tho.

[–] [email protected] 47 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I dunno what you guys are doing that makes your nextcloud die without touching it

Mine runs happily until I decide to update it

[–] [email protected] 14 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I swear every update ends up breaking it and putting it into maintenance mode for me. This would then lead to 1-2 hours of going through previously visited links to try and figure out what fixed it previously. For me personally, it seems like it's usually mariadb requiring a manual update that fixes it but it's always a little scary.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

I always run occ upgrade and occ db:add-missing-indices after a package upgrade, just to be sure that I do not miss any database migrations. Using Archlinux I wrote a pacman hook so that it happens automatically.

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[–] [email protected] 54 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

In my own personal experience, Nextcloud;

  • Needs constant attention to prevent falling over
  • Administration is a mess
  • Takes far too long to get used to its 'little ways'
  • Basics like E2EE don't work
  • Sync works when it feels like it
  • Updating feels like russian roulette
[–] [email protected] 25 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

Updating from my experience is not Russian roulette. It always requires manual intervention and drives me mad. Half the time I just wget the new zip and copy my config file and restart nginx lol.

Camera upload has been fantastic for Android, but once in a while it shits its brains out thinking there are conflicts when there are none and I have to tell it to keep local AND keep server side to make them go away.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Am i the only one left who doesn't want a snap docker Kubernetes container and just installs nextcloud in a normal way and never had any problems?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Same here. I'm just installing it normally, and my nextcloud instance is just chugging along.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago (3 children)

For me it's the opposite. I tried to use nextcloud for years, installing the normal way, and it always broke for no reason. I just started using it on docker and it has been perfect, fingers crossed.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 11 months ago (3 children)

This has been a serious concern of mine. In the event that I prematurely die I have everything set up with automatic updates, so that hopefully my family can continue to use the self-hosted services without me.

Nextcloud will not stop shitting the bed. I'd give it a few months at most if I died, at which point my family would likely turn back to Google Drive.

I'm looking for a more reliable alternative, even if it's not as feature-rich.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago

I've told my wife and family that if something happens to me, they need to start migrating all their stuff off my self-hosted services to cloud services because its a matter of time before something fails and nobody's around who knows or cares to fix it.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 11 months ago (4 children)

Only complaints I have with Nextcloud are that it's slow and updates suck over the web interface. But apart from that it has been reliable. I'm not running it through Docker. In fact, my installation is so old that the database tables still have an oc_ prefix.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I run it and mariaDB in docker and they run perfectly when left alone, but everything breaks horribly if I try to do an update. I recently figured out that you need to do updates for NC in steps, and docker (unRAID’s, specifically) defaults to jumping to the latest version. I think I figured out how to specify version now so fingers crossed I won’t destroy it the next time I do updates.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago (7 children)

This is probably what I'm doing wrong. I'm using linuxserver's docker which should be okay to auto update, but it just continuously degrades over time with updates until it becomes non-functional. Random login failures, logs failing to load, file thumbnails disappearing, the goddamn Collabora office docker that absolutely refuses to work for more than one week, etc.

I just nuke the NC docker and database and start from scratch every year or so.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 11 months ago

When I first deployed Nextcloud, it was just like this. Random crashes, lockups, weird user signin issues, slow and clunky.

But one day it just started working and was super stable. I didn't do anything, still not sure what fixed it lol.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 11 months ago

None. I don't make a habit of keeping "misbehaving" apps around. If I can't get to the bottom of a specific issue that app is getting the boot from my stable.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

I've been running nextcloud since before it was nextcloud. Was owncloud then moved to next cloud.

Another user put it best. It always feels 75% complete. Sync isn't fast, gives errors that self correct when restarting the all. Most plugins are even more janky or feel super barren.

I wanted to like it so much but I stopped being able to trust most plugins which meant I had dedicated apps for those things and used nextcloud only for file sync.

If you only want file sync then seafile is vastly superior so that's what I now have.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Sounds like a common software issue. All the features where developed to 80%, and then moved on to the next feature. Leaving that last, difficult, time consuming, 20% open and unfinished.

It's the difference between more corporate or Enterprise projects and FOSS projects in a lot of ways. Even once that project matures and becomes a more corporate product the same attitude towards completeness and correctness tends to persist.

(not saying foss is bad, just that the bar tends to be lower in my experience of building software, for many legitimate reasons).

It's "cultural" in a way depending on the project.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

Yeah, I wish Nextcloud focused more on the file manager side of their applications. I was using it on my TrueNAS instance and it seems like an unfinished product. E2EE is not enabled by default and looks like their implementation is not perfect either.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I really don't understand all those posts: I use nginx, apparmor, partially even modsecurity, I use collabora office official debian package, face recognition, email, update regularly (waiting for major upgrades for every app I use to be updated), etc. and literally never had a problem in the last 5 years except for my own experiment. True, only 5 people use my instance, but Nextcloud is rock solid for me

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I have nextcloud running since nearly 5 years and it never failed once. Only dowtime is when the backup fails and somehow maintenance mode is still enabled (technically not a crash)

For those interested: Running in docker with mariadb in a stack, checking updates with watchtower everyday and pulling from stable, backups with borg(matic)

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

++same

Docker:nextcloud+mariadb+caddy

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago

Installed Nextcloud-AIO using the docker script, took about 4 - 5 terminal commands. Practically zero issues! Hopefully someone else can provide some help in the thread!

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago (5 children)

Always works great for me.

I just run it (behind haproxy on a separate public host) in docker compose w/ a redis container and a hosted postgres instance.

Automatically upgrade minor versions daily by pulling new images. Manually upgrade major versions by updating the compose file.

Literally never had a problem in 4 years.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago

Nextcloud has been super solid for me using the official docker image.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago (2 children)

This is ultimately why I ditched Nextcloud. I had it set up, as recommended, docker, mariadb, yadda yadda. And I swear, if I farted near the server Nextcloud would shit the bed.

I know some people have a rock solid experience, and that’s great, but as with everything, ymmv. For me Nextcloud is not worth the effort.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Never had a single functional problem with Nextcloud, other than the fact that it's oppressively slow with the amount of files I've shoved into it. Mind you I also don't use MySQL/MariaDB which I consider a garbage-tier DB. Despite Postgres not being the "Recommended DB" for Nextcloud it works perfectly for me. Maybe that's the difference.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

Postgres is the standard db in the AIO container nextcloud has put out as their standard.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

For years, I had an unstable unraid server. I was fixing it every couple of days after a lockup. I had decided that unraid sucked. When it was up for a week I celebrated. Every one of my dockers was a suspect. I learned to hate all of them.

Then I shitcanned the next cloud docker.

Been up for months without a hiccup.

[–] jack 8 points 11 months ago

I've just finally and fully spun down a proxmox server I've been running and updating as my home lab for six years.

Every major update seemed to break something. Upgrades were always a roll of the dice as to whether it would even boot. It's probably at least partially my fault for using an old R710 and running docker directly on the OS instead of within a container, but it was still by far my least reliable piece of kit.

The last apt update removed sudo, and I can't be arsed to rebuild, so I've moved the critical bits to a fleet of SBCs. Powering that fucker down was a huge relief.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

The problem child for me right now is a game built in node.js that I'm trying to host/fix. It's lagging at random with very little reason, crashing in new and interesting ways every day, and resisting almost all attempts at instrumentation & debugging. To the point most things in DevTools just lock it up full stop. And it's not compatible with most APMs because most of the traffic occurs over websockets. (I had Datadog working, but all it was saying was most of the CPU time is being spent on garbage collection at the time things go wonky--couldn't get it narrowed down, and I've tried many different GC settings that ultimately didn't help)

I haven't had any major problems with Nextcloud lately, despite the fragile way in which I've installed it at work (Nextcloud and MariaDB both in Kubernetes). It occasionally gets stuck in maintenance mode after an update, because I'm not giving it enough time to run the update and it restarts the container and I haven't given enough thought to what it'd take to increase that time. That's about it. Early on I did have a little trouble maintaining it because of some problems with the storage, or the database container deciding to start over and wipe the volume, but nothing my backups couldn't handle.

I have a hell of a time getting the email to stay working, but that's not necessarily a Nextcloud problem, that's a Microsoft being weird about email problem (according to them it is time to let go of ancient apps that cannot handle oauth2--Nextcloud emailer doesn't support this, same with several other applications we're running, so we have to do some weird email proxy stuff)

I am not surprised to hear some of the stories in this thread, though. Nextcloud's doing a lot of stuff. Lots of failure points.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I've setup Nextcloud but have done next to nothing with it.

My Lemmy instance gives me the most problems, but it's also the only publicly available service I run. Mostly the issue is it seems to have a memory leak that forces me to restart it every few days.

Everything else has been completely rock solid for me, running on a mini pc (formerly a pi4 until I wanted to start doing stuff with Jellyfin and needed more power for transcoding) on OpenSUSE Leap all in docker containers. Makes it insanely easy to move stuff. I had no issues basically just copying the docker-compose files and data and bringing them up even when switching architectures.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago (3 children)

The only device running Snap in my house is a Raspberry Pi running the Snap Nextcloud and it's rock solid.

This might be a deployment issue. How are most people running it?

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

The solution for me is that I run Nextcloud on a Kubernetes cluster and pin a container version. Then every few months I update that version in my deployment yaml to the latest one I want to run, and run kubectl apply -f nextcloud.yml and it just does its thing. Never given me any real trouble.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago (7 children)

Same with my arch install, didn't touched it for 2 months even though laptop was turned off it decided to die when i launched it and run pacman -syu

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

This got mee googling Nextcloud and I think I'm going to give it a try 😱

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters
CA (SSL) Certificate Authority
DNS Domain Name Service/System
Git Popular version control system, primarily for code
HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web
LAMP Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP stack for webhosting
LXC Linux Containers
PiHole Network-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole)
RPi Raspberry Pi brand of SBC
SBC Single-Board Computer
SSH Secure Shell for remote terminal access
SSL Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption
nginx Popular HTTP server

10 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 10 acronyms.

[Thread #392 for this sub, first seen 1st Jan 2024, 02:35] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I've been updating Nextcloud in-place (manually) for multiple major versions without any flaws. What is the problem?

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

Well... no... I have been self hosting it for several years over multiple major versions now. Only for Files, Calendar and Deck though. It was a bit hard to set up, but reading the general Apache and PHP documentation helped a lot.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

Works great for me. I had it running in a snap for awhile, but now I just have it in a proxmox Debian container running a LAMP stack. I have over a terabyte of stuff saved and multiple computers syncing too, so its well used.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

I can’t remember the last time I laughed this much

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

The new Linuxserver.io docker image at the very least has solved the annoying update cycle NextCloud has and seems to have fixed the need to do that every few months. I haven't ever had it die but I don't push it hard and I keep the plugins to a minimum because I just don't trust it and it doesn't run all that well.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (4 children)

I've hosted mine for years on my own bare metal Debian/Apache install and 28 is the first update that has been a major pain. I've had the occasional need to install a new package to enable a new feature, or needed to add new/missing indices to the database, but the web interface literally tells you how to do those things, so they're not hard.

28 though broke several of the "featured" apps that I use regularly, like "Retention". It also introduced some questionable UI changes that they had to fix with the recent .1 update. I'll get occasional errors when trying to move or delete files in the web interface and everything. 28 really feels like beta software, even though we're a point release in and I got it from the "stable" update channel.

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