I once lost some important files stored on OneDrive. These were pretty marge media files. There were downloaded as a zip file, apparently successfully. Then, I deleted those files from OneDrive.<p>Imagine my surprise some time later when I went to access those files. Upon expanding the zip file, I saw that the media files in question had been replaced by some text files, with their content indicating that the download of those media files failed, and instructing me to try to download them again.<p>What the heck, so I could download a thousand files, which realistically I can't go through one-by-one to check if any have been replaced by a text file, and OndeDrive does not alert me to the fact that some files could not be downloaded.<p>I already had issues with the slowness and clunkiness of OneDrive, but this was the last straw. I'm migrating all my data from there.
My experience with Nextcloud was underwhelming. Regular crashes, very slow sync if you have thousands of files, full reupload on any change and ignored files that do not get synced with no warnings. I had made five accounts for my family and each of them got a separate blocking bug. The worst part was the syncing of shared folders.<p>I ended up using Seafile, which is mostly open source and has beek rock solid for the past two years. I'm not looking back!
Not relate with the post but a rant against OneDrive a couple of weeks ago came to my mind:<p>My partner uses Windows 11. She works and also studies in college. In both places they use Office360 so, she has her laptop set up with her Microsoft accounts and switches between college one and work when needs it. The other day, she came for help asking why the college OneDrive was getting full when she only has documents. Turns out that the fucking OneDrive decided to synchronize the whole user personal folder (where she has very personal stuff) into the college's OneDrive. Surprisingly, disabling such a wrong behavior was not straight forward as I expected. Microsoft has managed to make it ambiguous enough for having to spend a fair amount of time on such a simple thing.<p>I don't know it's just another example of them trying to shovel down your throat their cloud services or just some obscure plan to simply have access to all your very personal data (or both).
Our business migrated from OneDrive for business to a self-hosted Seafile [1] setup (we run it in a docker).<p>Seafile has a syncing client, and a drive client (Seadrive) for viewing files as if it was a shared drive.<p>Since moving to Seadrive I have not had a single support issue, nor heard of a single issue syncing, whereas I'd have them weekly with OneDrive to the point we'd have to delete their local files and re-setup OneDrive from scratch.<p>OneDrive truly is an abomination built on top of archaic Sharepoint.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.seafile.com/en/home/" rel="nofollow">https://www.seafile.com/en/home/</a>
I think the author misrepresented the NAS option a bit. I have the same Sinology DS220j and from my experience, you definitely do not need to constantly install/manage software, configure network access and renew certificates. Yes, these tasks pop up every now and then, but I don't think you can say you're "very busy" with something that takes 1 hour/year.<p>There are also significant benefits of running your own NAS - no big tech company has your documents, and they can't lock you out on a whim (such as if your Google or Microsoft account gets suspended for sometimes unfair reasons). The access speed is much higher with the data on LAN, and therefore there's little need to keep the data duplicated on your machine. And you have offline access. Security options are generally better than with most cloud providers - you can configure the firewall to deny access to anyone but whitelisted IPs, or do the many other things you can do if you own your firewall.<p>Finally, it's not true to say that all of your files would be gone on a NAS if something happened to the server. This goes back to the saying about data copies "two is one and one is none". You can set up backups to another NAS overnight, or use one of the cheap cloud storage services not meant for random access like Backblaze B2. Of course, the NAS itself is vulnerable physically - if it gets caught in a fire, stolen, or flooded for example.
Nextcloud on Hetzner has been great in my experience. Running for a few months now as a Dropbox replacement and very happy. Mobile app, mac app, it all seems to work exactly as expected.<p>My only gripe is that they do not allow Nextcloud external storage[0] but that's understandable given what they're selling.<p>[0]: <a href="https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/admin_manual/configuration_files/external_storage_configuration_gui.html" rel="nofollow">https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/admin_manual/config...</a>
I used syncthing[1] for that althought use case is a bit different - syncthing is mostly to sync the data between many devices (p2p) without option to have partial sync on a directory; you can have more than one synced directories but "one big directory" will be "one big directory" on every machine.<p>So I have my phone pics synced to my NAS and PC, my blog's markdown files between server and my computers, another dir for some music etc. There is also option for simple versioning in case you need to dig out the old files but it's not integrated with OS as it is "just a directory".<p>Disadvantages is that you need at least one other device running to sync as it is P2P (with some community-ran server to forward if you're NATed out of sight) but other than that, literally zero problems.<p>[1] <a href="https://syncthing.net/" rel="nofollow">https://syncthing.net/</a>
As a current user of Dropbox, Google Drive & OneDrive I can definitely say that Dropbox beats the other two (and probably any other similar service) in both network transfers (up/down) and indexing time (especially if you consider LAN sync too for when mirroring data between devices). The level of file/folder movement you can do in Dropbox while it's sync'ing data is unparalleled. If you try doing the same e.g. with Google Drive, you will either end up with duplicate files or even lose data overall.<p>But we all know that this probably comes at a potential cost, e.g. privacy related concerns (anyone remember the controversial Dropbox board appointment of C. Rice back in the day?), services getting hacked etc.<p>So knowing the above and knowing that with Nextcloud, Owncloud, Syncthing etc. you fully control your cloud backup, any (perhaps) lower performance takes a step back for sure. But then again, if you're hosting on a server that's geographically close to you & on a solid datacenter with great peering (e.g. Hetzner, Scaleway/Online.net or OVH for Europeans), performance can be on par or perhaps even better compared to "established" backup cloud services.
Personally, I really love Syncthing <a href="https://syncthing.net/" rel="nofollow">https://syncthing.net/</a>, if you do not need an iOS client.<p>I have it set up on all my families windows machines, my personal machines and between two NAS. One of the NAS does nightly backups to backblaze.
Owncloud/Nextcloud... beware. It's significantly worse than the other services.<p>I've tried really hard to make it work (including self-hosting), but it's just poor software, for a few reasons.<p>Worst problem, which I haven't experienced with the other services, is that if there is a connection problem (this may happen routinely, if servers have scheduled downtime), files may go out of sync. Result is that, ridiculously, one may get conflicts even if they're using a single client in total. There was an issue opened, which has been ignored and autoclosed for a while.<p>Second, lack of centralization causes a bit of a mess. One never knows which version the servers ship (although one may not care); hosts may be less realiable, and finally, hosts may change frequently (I've see a few changes in the list of free servers) so one is never sure how long the service will be offered.<p>Also, the configuration shipped with the Nginx version was not great. Overall, I think that the software "isn't great", and I don't trust it for personal data.
If comparing on costs, hosting it on home HW is by far the best way to go. I run Rsync and keep the backup in my shed so it is off-site.<p>Nextcloud provides way more than data backups. It is best in class for personal internet services. My family and friends use my server for syncing their contacts, calendars, tasks, kanban, music, RSS, bookmarks, passwords, notes, and finances to all their devices. Ours is also setup with Talk for voice and video conferencing, polls, forms, phone tracking, CMS, mail, maps, activity pub social media, and there are a ton of other possible apps. It is perfect solution to avoid Goopple.
Why didn't you stay with pcloud, again? You mentioned encryption was uncomfortable, but in the end you selected nextcloud which doesn't have reliable encryption.<p>*I am a pcloud user since 5 years ago
Aside from Dropbox do any of the mentioned providers offer auto save functionality for docs and spreadsheets? For me that’s really the killer feature (that and the fact that I paid $100 for 7 years of service using MS’s employee discount offering for everyone during the pandemic).<p>Every time people talk about self hosting or using a different cloud provider my biggest concern is auto save. And I haven’t heard anyone address it.
I was looking into how I could set up Hetzner Storage Box as a storage device for Nextcloud. Somehow I didn’t even realize that Hetzner offers their own hosted Nextcloud instances (Storage Share).
iCloud+ 2TB: 9.99 €<p>does the macOS and iOS backup. Click buy and pretty much done. Also have my parents data backed up with family sharing, I don’t have to be family IT support!<p>If you have other devices… Tim Cook recommends replacing those with Apple devices /sarcasm<p>Only requirement not met is not having a plan that supports more than 2T.<p>Yes, Apple owns my life. But happy about it for now, good value.
What about backblaze b2 with rclone, I'm sure there's a front end somewhere and with the clousflare cdn it's no egress cost. Or clousflares storage amounts
So this article is about looking for a perfect solution, not finding it, and finally compromising on some of them, like end-to-end encryption, ease of migration...?
<i>> if anything happened to my trusty server, all my files would potentially be gone</i><p>This is what a good backup solution is for.<p>While Hetzner's product and other hosted NextCloud instances come with some protection baked in I would still strongly suggest an off-service backup rather than keeping all your eggs in one basket.<p>(I'm assuming here that NextCloud is being used as the primary storage, rather than a backup location for other storage, if everything else is elsewhere already then the need for an extra full backup solution is reduced)
I backup (encrypted) to multiple places, including to Google Drive using a Turkish billing account on another google account. 2tb works out to about $30USD per year.<p>In terms of actual computer backups, thanks to btrfs+btrbk I can incremental backup every hour over LAN to my server and also to my attached USB drive. With compression/snapshots this is pretty small.
Re the article and PCloud, the way the crypto folder works is that you get a mapped PCloud drive similar to OneDrive, DropBox, etc., and <i>within</i> there you get a "Crypto Folder". When you try and access that, it's empty. You then unlock it. However the article is wrong in that you are not prompted every time. You are prompted until it locks again, and you are in control of whether it locks automatically or not.<p>I've used PCloud for years now. I only unlock my Crypto when I need files from inside it, keep it unlocked and accessible for as long as I need, then lock it again. It's actually a really good way of working. Less valuable files are always available in the main mapped drive so working with them is easy, but the more secure option is available too.<p>It also supports Linux properly, and whilst not as fast as DropBox is certainly faster than Google Drive and OneDrive. And it allows multiple synced folders in addition to the mapped drive.<p>I moved on from Google Drive when I found that some of my documents, which I'd specifically requested be mirrored locally, were found to contain http links to the online version rather than an actual local copy. Meaning some of my local backups contained useless stub files. And the total inability of the web UI to give me simple folder size details was annoying - almost like they were encouraging me to keep filling the space I had.<p>I moved on from OneDrive when it wouldn't let me store files it thought might be dangerous (including `.js`, though I suspect they fixed that years ago). I also stored some older PHP code files in there (old enough to predate my git usage). When I looked at them they had an extra line of text added to the top of each file. I can't remember if it was a hashbang, comment, or text, as it was too long ago. I just remember my shock that they would <i>change</i> my uploaded files automatically.<p>Conclusion: after trying all those the article did (except, oddly enough given the article, NextCloud) I found PCloud to be ideal. For me.
I pay 4eur for 1tb managed NextCloud from Hetzner - it's a good service overall but it's unusable for photos. Apart from iCloud at 10eur per month are there any alternatives with a good photos (viewing, sharing, tagging, ai etc) integration?
> On top of that, I became very busy with managing software, installing updates, configuring the network access<p>Ironically using a Windows as a NAS is easier because everything is point and click, reducing cognitive load.<p>You can also afford to be on a slower update schedule if you stick the application behind a NAT and proxy, which blocks 99% of drive-by attacks (because the attacker don’t even know where to look).
It might be worth trying the Insync client instead of the official OneDrive one as I've found that quite slow to sync large libraries. It's far more customisable and runs on Linux too.<p><a href="https://www.insynchq.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.insynchq.com/</a>
I'm thinking of moving off Dropbox. The 2TB plan pricing is quite fair, their sync client is far superior to competitors in terms of speed, efficiency and correctness.. but their plans above 2TB are just not worth the money to me (it gets more expensive per GB)
I have used a couple of OneDrive family accounts to host some media files that I wanted to preserve (yt video downloads, academic courses and papers collected from questionable soruces). What are the chances MS blocks access to my data in the next 1 year?