Introducing the Nextcloud Box

Oh god the bend radius on those cables. Also atrocious sinking and warping. This is the kind of stuff I have nightmares about. Please if you're thinking of building a hardware project and have never done it before at least consult someone like me. I'll look over anyone in SF's project and give a list of things to worry over for the price of a coffee, just don't do this.

I ordered one of these when western digital announced them a few months ago, it&#x27;s basically a 1tb laptop hard drive. and a bulky plastic case.<p>Firstly, the cable layout is frustrating, and requires bending the cables in such away that makes closing the case a pain.<p>Secondly, the software is very unimpressive, I had the system just stop responding several times, the windows client is rather underwhelming as well.<p>I just see no real advantages to say combining my own raspberry pi with a WD passport.<p>Other than the plastic box.

So you&#x27;re buying a case and a hard drive, you have to put it together yourself, and it only works with a raspberry pi 2? Seems like anyone interested enough to buy this would just do it themselves.

So a hard drive, one with an onboard USB bridge no less, and a raspberry Pi.<p>USB performance on Pi is garbage, and you&#x27;re sharing your storage I&#x2F;O with the network I&#x2F;O since they&#x27;re both USB prehiperals.<p>This is a terrible idea.

I&#x27;m trying to figure out what this buys me versus a Synology box running DS Cloud (Synology&#x27;s &quot;personal cloud&quot; app). With a Synology NAS I get:<p>* Data on my own box.<p>* Remote access via the DS Cloud app on devices, or the web app.<p>* RAID with an external backup drive.<p>With Nextcloud, it looks like I get:<p>* Data stored where ever I like, including my Synology NAS(?).<p>* Some kind of remote access, and it&#x27;s stored on the NextCloud(?).<p>* On my own for backups, no RAID.<p>* No idea on pricing.<p>If it&#x27;s dirt cheap, I guess maybe a Nextcloud is an option. But if it begins to approach the price of Synology&#x27;s least expensive offers I fail to see the value.

Wouldn&#x27;t the drive performance be significantly inhibited by RPi&#x27;s USB 2.0 interface? A small board with SATA or USB 3.0 would be much faster.

Here&#x27;s the thing. If you want storage, you&#x27;ve got to use ZFS or be very brave and use BTRFS. RAID and single drive solutions are not going to cut it. Bit rot is a real thing and assuming you care about your data you want checksums and redundancy. If you don&#x27;t want to think about it: set up a FreeNAS&#x2F;NAS4Free appliance. If you do, build something slightly custom. To date, I know of no complaints maimed products that fit this criteria. It is frustrating, but family photos are not replaceable so don&#x27;t take chances.

So, can anyone shed some more light on what &quot;Nextcloud&quot; (the software&#x2F;OS part) actually is? As far as I can gather it&#x27;s more or less a fork of owncloud by one of the owncloud maintainers, paired with ubuntu core, and turned into a kind-a-sorta groupware and file server? But for some reason lacking an ldap&#x2F;kerberos&#x2F;ad&#x2F;directory server - so it can&#x27;t be the <i>only</i> part of a small office network - you still need ldap&#x2F;AD set-up?<p>I&#x27;m not entirely sure I see the value proposition here.

The box is running Ubuntu Core, which fully uses &quot;snaps&quot; instead of the traditional .deb packages.<p>There is a post that describes their experience of selecting and implementing with Ubuntu Core for this box, at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;insights.ubuntu.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;09&#x2F;29&#x2F;the-making-of-the-nextcloud-box&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;insights.ubuntu.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;09&#x2F;29&#x2F;the-making-of-the-nex...</a>

Looked the document, and the real interesting thing is the split cable used internally, i.e. a cable that splits usb3-micro-typeB into a power-and-usb2, that cable seems neat, is it a customized one only for this product, or a generic cable that you can find on ebay? I happen to have RPI and the same WD USB3 hard drive here and with this cable I can try owncloud without the enclosure right away.

Hosting vet checking in:<p>Sorry but what&#x27;s cloudy about this? No high-availability, no redundancy. I guess Nextserver just isn&#x27;t as marketable.

As a side note, AFAIK WD &quot;USB only&quot; disks may pose a problem (in case of issues) because they (or at least most of them) have a form of pass-through encryption, i.e. the data on the disk is encrypted and is decrypted on-the-fly by a chip on the PCB, if a component of the PCB fails, recovering the data becomes very, very difficult even if the hard disk works otherwise fine.

Not a good idea. As a personal anecdote, I had my 1TB HP simplesafe drive crash and I lost lot of precious pictures from recent years [Before moving to cloud]. The drive was Western Digital and none of the recovery software worked. You run the risk of drive failures with these and also not easy to migrate data once data grows or hardware evolves.

The software seems similar to sandstorm (sandstorm.io). This has a more integrated&#x2F;opinionated app experience, rather than a software platform for apps of one&#x27;s choosing? I can live with PHP, but Java is not something I willingly depend on. I suppose if I don&#x27;t have to diddle with anything, I could live with Java.

Does this offer anything that the Lima product doesn&#x27;t? [1] I bought a Lima, but never actually used it.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meetlima.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meetlima.com</a>

correct me if I&#x27;m wrong, but I think this is a fork of owncloud<p>owncloud is nothing but horrible, full of bugs and zero innovation when it comes to file sharing.

Little bit expensive for just a box and a disk

Thought this was a pied piper joke

No RAID for personal storage?!?<p>What about a warning stating that you cannot keep your important stuff here unless you want to loose them in a undetermined moment in the future?