I have switched from Nextcloud to Syncthing. The former was a resource hog that was eating up too much everything on my modest VPS.
I share the files on my local network at home between phone, laptop and desktop. My only issues so far:
- I need to manually start Syncthing on the devices, whereas Nextcloud was always running on boot. Not sure if I should start it every time, especially on the Android phone which cannot sync while away from home. I do not want to empty the battery while outside of my LAN, + the persistent notification "Syncthing is running" is annoying.
- I need to power up at least the laptop or desktop to backup my phone data. One solution that I will try is to install a headless Syncthing instance on my NAS. This way the phone can always sync to the NAS every time, and then laptop/desktop can sync from NAS when needed.
The joys of peer2peer! At least, I am sure that my moderately sensitive files are not leaving my local network to be stored on my VPS, which can be hacked someday.
I also need to figure out how to install Wireguard on my router to allow to access my NAS from my phone while on a trip, but that's another story.
On Ubuntu (and probably other distros that use Systemd as well) you need to enable the user service manually once for your user:
systemctl --user enable --now syncthing.service
This will start syncthing whenever your user session is active. By default that means when you login. If you run this command:
sudo loginctl enable-linger $USER
Then your user service manager will be started at boot and run regardless if you are logged in or not. (The default behavior makes more sense on desktop and laptop computers.)
Thanks! I will use the enable-linger on the NAS running 24/7, and configure it using a remote browser (probably via SSH tunnel). This way I can always sync to NAS even if everything else is off, and the laptop/desktop will sync from the NAS when required.
I saw just now that there are also system units (started with "systemctl enable --now syncthing@USER_NAME_HERE.service", note the lack of --user). If you use those then you don't need to activate linger. Using those is probably considered the more standard way of doing things on an unattended server.
I've dealt with the Android issue by configuring Syncthing to only run when the phone is charging. I'm in the habit of leaving my phone to charger every night anyway, so I'm regularly synced. It would be great if there would be a 'Sync now' function though, that would run the sync and then go back to ordinary mode afterwards, for the rare case that I need my folder synced in the instant.
I have a hybrid, where I don't use the sync features of next cloud, but do use the contacts and calendar. Syncthing is setup to sync to the Nextcloud files folder, and a nextcloud config option (forget the exact option) allows Nextcloud to immediately pick up the files that syncthing dropped.
For the contacts and calendar I still use the VPS, but with radicale [0] instead of Nextcloud. The resource usage is minimal, probably the attack surface too. And I like the do one thing and do it well mantra (in this case, CalDAV/CardDAV).
I access radicale via an nginx proxy with proper HTTPS (LetsEncrypt) and an HTPASSWD over that, so the setup is secure. However radicale default setup is not secure, I agree.
Radicale is a great FOSS solution for syncing via the CardDAV and CalDAV protocols. I simply prefer using end-to-end encryption for extra protection where possible, which is why I think EteSync is a good alternative. E2EE means that even if the server is compromised, my contacts, calendars, and tasks won't be.
> [Nextcloud] was a resource hog that was eating up too much everything on my modest VPS.
I've seen comments like this in multiple occasions. Is it really that bad? I guess if there was a flagrant performance bug, it would have been sorted out with time, so the only remaining explanation is that the code is really poorly laid out, or with design flaws that cause so many performance problems for users.
However next to each "it's a resource hog" there is always another comment saying "it works fantastically well", so I never know what to think (sort of trying it myself, but I'm not that interested in the issue)
The Nextcloud Windows desktop client is very poorly written. We needed an in-house file hosting solution to replace really old Samba shares and Nextcloud seemed like a great option because we also were looking for a non-Google alternative to Google Docs/Drive (one of our clients has anti-Google policy).
After moving all files to Nextcloud server everyone (company of 20+ people) installed Nextcloud Windows Desktop client and connected to it with only virtual files option set (nothing is transfered until opened/edited). The initial "sync" after first seup took about 2-3 days to complete for everyone. Reason? Probably too many small files. The share contained about 300+GB of data in around 500k files (not sure about that number only a guess). Nextcloud checks every single file with server which computes hash for it which is stored locally. You can find threads on their community forum or reddit by people experiencing same slow behavior when they have a lot of small files. There were some promises from devs to resolve it with the latest client update but we didn't verify it yet.
The hogged resource for me is disk space. The more recent versions are bundling more and more features like a web-based word processor etc. that are just useless baggage for me. (I do like the calendar and contact sync.) I have a small hosted site with a tiny personal Nextcloud instance, just for sharing a handful of files, plus a small Wordpress site, and I had to upgrade from 500 MB to 1 GB to fit it in and also be able to run the upgrader.
I tried both and stayed with Nextcloud because of some features (especially sharing and specifically private links).
I have a ~5 years old server (Intel Skylake, 8 GB RAM) on which I run a bunch od docker containers (about 30). One of them is Nextcloud and the load average is 0.8-1.0. This is for an average of 2 users (me and the rest of my family that in total uses the server as I do myself).
Not a very scientific comparison, but I never had any performance issues.
Thanks for the suggestion. This is an app for Windows [0] but everything I use is Linux, so the setup to start SyncThing it at boot should be straightforward.
I am more worried about the Android part. The best solution would be to start SyncThing when on my LAN via matching SSID, and disable it when I am out of range.
> One solution that I will try is to install a headless Syncthing instance on my NAS
I've got an old computer which I run things on occasionally. I installed syncthing on it for a while and it worked well. Stopped leaving that computer on so now when there's something that needs to be synced between my desktop and laptop I just use my phone as the middle always on server.
If you just need to access your NAS from outside your home network so your phone can syncthing to it, you can use syncthing in global mode -- it will use public relay servers to sync between phone and NAS. But maybe you need more than that / knew this already.
I share the files on my local network at home between phone, laptop and desktop. My only issues so far:
- I need to manually start Syncthing on the devices, whereas Nextcloud was always running on boot. Not sure if I should start it every time, especially on the Android phone which cannot sync while away from home. I do not want to empty the battery while outside of my LAN, + the persistent notification "Syncthing is running" is annoying.
- I need to power up at least the laptop or desktop to backup my phone data. One solution that I will try is to install a headless Syncthing instance on my NAS. This way the phone can always sync to the NAS every time, and then laptop/desktop can sync from NAS when needed.
The joys of peer2peer! At least, I am sure that my moderately sensitive files are not leaving my local network to be stored on my VPS, which can be hacked someday.
I also need to figure out how to install Wireguard on my router to allow to access my NAS from my phone while on a trip, but that's another story.