I really want to like Nextcloud. I had it all set up perfectly earlier this year with their "AIO" setup. Then some upgrade came along and completely destroyed my install, couldn't get the containers to start after that, couldn't figure out how to debug it; seemed like the only way to get it back on its feet was to wipe and start over. I wiped; I haven't started over yet.
Ah, that happened to me, too. Back in June or July. I couldn't be bothered to fix it for months, and it eventually took me a full weekend to get it working again.
Turns out there's some extremely specific weirdness with docker on ZFS. I had to install a userspace FS overlay or something.
But even after all that, I pretty much never use the damn thing. The web interface is the slowest, most bloated and broken thing I've ever had the misfortune to interact with. The desktop and mobile apps have the absolute bare minimum features, and still somehow manage to be broken and unusable.
It sure sounds like a cool idea to glom together your files and email and jira and calendar and everything else into one unified dashboard for your life. But it takes nearly a minute for the web ui to respond to anything. Browsing files takes minutes. And absolutely forget about music or photos, that barely works at all.
At this point, I just use it as a place to blindly dump all my files. I get a notification every. Single. Day. that my backup succeeded, so my files are probably safe I guess. Can't turn off the notification, or filter notifications in general. So I have an unending torrent of useless garbage notifications that perfectly hide any truly important notices.
I had this happen to me as well, though I remember that it was either a docker or snap/flatpak/etc version of it. Got things working but lost a few months of data, likely something I foolishly did while trying to make things work. Stopped using it and went with Seafile for a while - grew frustrated with that and stopped syncing files between computers altogether.
Later on, when I set up an old dell xeon workstation as a home server (using proxmox), I used the turnkey image of nextcloud, and have (knock on wood) not had any issues at all.
Anyway - I wanted to ensure it was fully virtualized this next time if/when this happens again. I have it backing up the base vm once a week (I have the file storage separate/outside of the vm). So... hopefully this doesn't happen again to the degree that it did.
I have been upgrading my then owncloud setup now nextcloud setup for the last 10 years or so almost without issue - most issues I had where back when it was still owncloud. I think I did a wipe back then once. Nowadays even if something goes wrong I know what i can do. For instance i upgraded PHP too soon once and had to manually patch it.
Anecdotal evidence tho. Results vary. I like nextcloud because worst case all a wipe would cost me is a re-upload of my local folders over a couple of hours.
Same here, but it's a big and complicated beast. I never lost data but then with hundreds of thousands of servers out there, somebody is bound to. Even if it's just due to bloody cosmic rays ;-)
No it's due to nextclouds crazy AIO container that creates other containers automatically, and hides the entire process from the user so there's no easy way to diagnose issues.
We can't turn on web server logging? PHP logging? We don't take DB backups? We can't revert to the previous image version? The crazy AIO NextCloud Docker image doesn't store your documents as plain files in a data/{$USER}/ directory that one can always rescue?
"Use the Docker image. It just works!"
Until it doesn't.
I know this will sound very greybeard, but as sysadmins, we can slog through understanding the systems we are running when we set them up, or we can wait until they break to figure them out. You can tell which path a sysadmin chose when they things like, "I upgraded and my containers wouldn't start, so I gave up." Why wouldn't they start? What's in the error logs?
No, it‘s their insane composition of „not-what-docker-was-made-for“ architecture. Their all in one solution is a bastardized version of compose, just give me a compose file with all services you run.
