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.
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 Upon expanding the zip file, I saw that the media files in question had been replaced by some text files, with their content indicating that the download of those media files failed, and instructing me to try to download them again.
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the heck, so I could download a thousand files, which realistically I can't go through one-by-one to check if any have been replaced by a text file, and OndeDrive does not alert me to the fact that some files could not be downloaded.
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.
We have multiple customers that send us data via OneDrive, and for all of them multi-file downloads do not work.
Microsoft's ZIP-Streamer to download multiple files simply does not work.
The text files contain exceptions with contents such as:
PK^C^D^T^@^H^H^@^@<80>L^PS^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@9^@^@^@__myfile.png_Error.txtThis file cannot be downloaded.
ExceptionType: ZipMeTAException.
CorrelationId: 08132d8f-77b7-4c75-a66b-345e8a15c340,
UTC DateTime: 8/16/2021 9:36:53 AMPK^G^H<FB>%Mw<A4>^@^@^@<A4>^@^@^@PK^C^D^T^@^H^H^@^@<80>L^PS^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@-^@^@^@myfile.png<89>PNG
This is nondeterministic per file, so you have to either manually click every single file in a folder to download everything to avoid ZIP streaming (you apparently cannot use any API to download files that were just shared via link and no other auth), or repeatedly "download the ZIP to convergence" -- which is exactly as silly as it sounds.
Since Microsoft has been outsourcing development and QA for some of their consumer products quality has gone downhill.
The picture browser is barely usable. Keeps scrolling back to the top. The iOS file provider sometimes doesn't respond. Downloading 500 photos locally on an iPad results in a unresponding app.
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.
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!
+1 here. Nextcloud is a pile of PHP scripts, while Seafile splits and diffs individual file blocks, and absolutely flies at 'whatever the lower of of your network and drive speed is', handling any file sizes you can throw at it.
On the other hand, Seafile is also a binary distributed by Chinese team, and if I was a Chinese secret service, I'd build in all the backdoors I can, which I guess already happened.
> On the other hand, Seafile is also a binary distributed by Chinese team, and if I was a Chinese secret service, I'd build in all the backdoors I can
This was the reason I tried and subsequently passed on Seafile. It’s one thing if it’s just my stuff, but I was setting it up as a syncing server for friends and family. I just wasn’t comfortable with this prospect and being responsible for others’ files, as well.
> Seafile is also a binary distributed by Chinese team
Web search for Seafile turned up a GitHub repository, so seems like it's open source? That doesn't rule out the possibility of a carefully-hidden back door that no one has found yet, of course. But I think it should increase confidence over a closed-source binary distribution.
Regardless, this level of xenophobia is getting a little tiresome. If you have evidence that this project is run by or sponsored by the Chinese government, then sure, I'd find that a showstopper as well. But a group of people, who just happen to be Chinese, building something shouldn't immediately be grounds for dismissal. China is a very big place, with a truly staggering number of people, and the Chinese government -- contrary to popular belief -- doesn't have its hands in everything its citizens do.
This! He says OneDrive is buggy, but that’s nothing compared to Nextcloud. He’s in for a big disappointment.
Seafile is a much better choice if you’re only looking for FileSync (without the whole App Store thing).
Another new and already better and faster contender: ownCloud OCIS, which is a complete Go rewrite of ownCloud and is already very fast and efficient and works like a charm for file sharing.
One thing that made me shy away from Seafile was the limitations of its Android client. IIRC it could only upload photos, not sync folders. So couldn't use it for notes, voice recordings, downloads, books...
I considered Syncthing as well, but I wanted both the arbitrary file sync and the web-based features. Figured I'd rather deal with Nextcloud's poor performance than cobble together a crappy Nextcloud clone via three separate apps.
I'm definitely keeping an eye out for OCIS though.
As a sysadmin managing Nextcloud on an on premise VPS, we have none of the problems you mentioned. We have 20+ accounts, tons of shared files, and whatnot.
Just upgraded to Nextcloud 25 (literally 20 minutes ago), and no problems whatsoever.
I deployed it on a virtualized server which is not extremely powerful, and everybody seems to enjoy the productivity boost it brought into the team.
I upgraded to Nexcloud25 and all Gui Customization's are gone...once again. I don't really like the php-nextcloud, using it for well over 4 years there is always something not right. I really hope the go-version is better.
Surprising that your and the OP's experiences are so different. Based on the description, I think it's safe to assume the OP also has thousands of files, some of them very large.
I wonder if the issue is with Nextcloud itself, or with the particular hosting provider.
Not relate with the post but a rant against OneDrive a couple of weeks ago came to my mind:
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.
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).
So, you are telling me that my girlfriend's college IT department, has the capability, through Office 360, of manipulating which folders to backup on the clients side? Man, I really hope it's Friday and my brain is exhausted and not getting what you said straight, otherwise, this weekend is gonna be a session of urgent OneDrive removal and Linux indoctrination for her.
One of the big issues we see with Office365 in the browser are people working with two different Office365 accounts in the same browser, which causes a lot of issues. Known folder redirection, which is the ability for us to turn on automatic syncing of the Desktop, Documents and Pictures folders on Windows machines has been pretty helpful for us. So many people dump everything on their desktop and if the computer dies or files have been accidentally deleted it saves them. Known folder redirect is now rolling out to Mac clients, which is more of a pain, as some of our users sign into iCloud and sync those same folders.
I know way too many people whom this has happened to. High school accounts, college accounts, even work accounts.
Even when it's a personal account, that feature messes up the C:\Users\username folder layout so then some apps save things into the non-OneDrive desktop folder and there's no way for an ordinary user to find them. Not to mention syncing broken program shortcuts (.lnk files) across devices and so on. This whole synchronization feature is a sysadmin nightmare slapped on top of a filesystem that wasn't designed to support it.
Its a hack and ugly. But lots of system admin folks love it and between them pushing it at work and MS pushing it its hard to avoid. Its reaaaaal shitty though, especially when they enable it on someone with a huge profile and you're in a baffling in-between while its trying to sync.
Our business migrated from OneDrive for business to a self-hosted Seafile [1] setup (we run it in a docker).
Seafile has a syncing client, and a drive client (Seadrive) for viewing files as if it was a shared drive.
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.
OneDrive truly is an abomination built on top of archaic Sharepoint.
> OneDrive truly is an abomination built on top of archaic Sharepoint.
OneDrive _for business_ is built on Sharepoint. Onedrive ... erm ... not for business (?) is an entirely separate product, and they don't interoperate.
Which is another baffling decision by Microsoft branding, since for regular users they make no distinction. It only becomes apparent when you discover you can't work with people outside the organisation.
> OneDrive _for business_ is built on Sharepoint. Onedrive ... erm ... not for business (?) is an entirely separate product, and they don't interoperate.
That is oh so weirdly common in MS ecosystem... like Skype for business being Lync and being significantly worse than "just" Skype (no idea what MS teams voice chat is based tho)
Ive been using seafile for over 5 yrs in my business and it has so far worked flawlessly!
There are only very rare hiccups with binary files such as excel sheets or PSD files, where seafile will create a “SFConflict” file. Havent figured out how to fix that het.
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.
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.
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.
I agree that objectively, it’s not much work to maintain the Synology NAS once everything is correctly set up. But I personally just got tired after attempting to configure the network access alone for the nth time. My goal was to make the NAS accessible remotely (i.e. from outside my home network) and I felt like that was already a big task (comparing different DynDNS providers, port forwarding, asking my internet provider for a static IP address). And the recurring tasks (mostly renewing certificates for the , as far as I remember) would annoy me every year or so.
And I agree with the advantages you listed about a NAS setup! That’s why I tried one out, after all. I did run into some scary security situations (once the DynDNS was set up, someone was immediately trying to log in via brute force), but nothing too major, fortunately. And I never got the network setup right (e.g. to use the local network speed when I’m home and still access my files the same way when I’m away via the internet). So, these were only theoretical advantages that I could never really get to myself (I’m sure other people figured it out, but I didn’t exactly find good documentation on these things online either).
And regarding your last point, I also generally agree! Although it feels silly to me to have a NAS at home and then still do regular backups via another storage/backup service elsewhere. I wouldn’t want to back up 1+ TB of files every day or even week, although there might be diffing solutions for that.
Anyway, I hope this answer makes it clearer why I decided against a (Synology) NAS in the end. I’m sure other peeps figured it out and are happy with their Synology setup, but for my purposes I’ve never really gotten there.
Its true that a Synology NAS takes some effort to set up initially and a little bit of maintenance work every now and then. But I don't think about my NAS most months. And on the months I need to, it's usually a short task that I do along with other house chores.
> I did run into some scary security situations (once the DynDNS was set up, someone was immediately trying to log in via brute force)
Yes. Unfortunately, that's pretty common on the internet. You can auto-blacklist IPs after a few incorrect login attempts, and firewall-blacklist IPs out of your country in general. These two measures should almost eliminate the brute force spam, and you should be able to verify that they are effective in Log Center. However, you also have other options because you own the firewall if what I suggested doesn't make sense (like if you are traveling a lot).
> Although it feels silly to me to have a NAS at home and then still do regular backups via another storage/backup service elsewhere.
My backups are be automated with a Synology app (like Hyper Backup). It uploads only changed files. The cloud storage on Backblaze is pretty cheap - I think I pay under $2 per month. But this gives me peace of mind for the "NAS destroyed in a tornado or something" scenario. On the other hand, keeping files in a NAS gives me peace of mind that I own what I have - no cloud storage provider can take it away from me.
All in all, I'm happy you found something that works for you. I think you value simplicity and time more, and I value control over my data more. So our choices differ. In any case, I just wanted to offer context from a NAS user.
> Although it feels silly to me to have a NAS at home and then still do regular backups via another storage/backup service elsewhere.
I do exactly this; a nightly backup to S3/Glacier. I use duplicity, so it only uploads diffs from the previous night. My NAS is a 4-drive RAID5 setup (RAID is not a backup!), but if I lost more than one drive -- and that has very nearly happened once -- all that data would be gone, forever. It only costs me a few bucks a month for that added peace of mind.
Thanks for writing this all up! FWIW, I have gone that NAS route in general though with TrueNAS (formerly FreeNAS), I didn't like Synology myself after trying it. I think remote access works better if you just do it via modern VPN. Wireguard has been incredible for me, and there are options like ZeroTier and Nebula for more advanced automated meshing and so on. For me at least I've found it better to have less vs more in a given component, so the NAS is focused pretty purely on storing and making available data and that's it, network services are all done elsewhere (in OPNsense for me), same with VMs. That keeps things much simpler (admittedly for HN-values of "simple"), the NAS and various other services can simply act purely as "LAN". Also makes it easier IMO to keep things better isolated and secured by avoiding any public WAN exposure except for VPN ports (and even that can be further offloaded with a cloud-based bastion or the like). I also just made my own internal CA, which means I'm free to set certificate lifetimes for 10-20 years if I want. Linux/BSDs of course are straight forward to add your own CAs too, and least with Apple devices as well it's super, super easy and free to make up a mobileconfig profile containing all CAs/certs and various other configs, then install is just a few clicks that even non-technical users can follow. Let's Encrypt is certainly cool and easy to setup in OPNsense but I don't think it's necessarily ideal for purely internal services with nothing public facing.
100% agree however that documentation is often lacking, though the OPNsense and FreeNAS docs remain pretty good.
>And regarding your last point, I also generally agree! Although it feels silly to me to have a NAS at home and then still do regular backups via another storage/backup service elsewhere. I wouldn’t want to back up 1+ TB of files every day or even week, although there might be diffing solutions for that.
Every backup solution I know off only syncs diffs, that's pretty table stakes for precisely that reason. For units that support snapshots, there are also plenty of controls for dealing with snapshot lifetimes and pruning. All of that certainly still is more upfront to setup however!
I think the big reasons for the expense and effort of a NAS though are mostly down to if you can/will make use of the speed and scale advantages. The security aspect might be a bit of a wash, one can do E2EE anyway with a typical cloud provider, and while they're more publicly exposed they've got much more serious effort behind them too. At 1TB it's probably not worth the effort. But other options definitely get more expensive as one gets into 10-20+ TB, and the value of more serious data integrity and snapshotting and so on too. 10 gigabit and even more is also getting quite reasonable to do on LAN, it's easy to saturate these days, and particularly for those of us living in rural areas with mediocre uplinks that can be genuinely handy.
I feel fortunate to though to live in a time when we all have so many options to meet our exact needs. Possible for a home or small business to put together options now that would have been top end enterprise stuff not that long ago.
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.
My only gripe is that they do not allow Nextcloud external storage[0] but that's understandable given what they're selling.
Good to hear that you haven’t run into any issues for a few months, at least! Some peeps warned me that Nextcloud is also quite buggy, but I didn’t run into any issues yet myself.
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.
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".
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.
That's not really true. You can specify which files you don't want synced. So, on my phone i can say "don't send me files that match the following pattern" https://docs.syncthing.net/users/ignoring.html
So in your example you could make a subfolder "big files" and exclude that subfolder from being synchronized to your mobile device.
I also love syncthing. I've got it set up to transfer my phone's pictures to my PC where I regularly sort through them and weed them out. And I've got a shared folder that's replicated across all my devices that contains my Obsidian vault, my KeePass file and other useful things
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.
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.
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.
Several years ago, I had a personal Dropbox account with lots of stuff in it. I joined a company that also had a corporate shared Dropbox. Since I couldn't sync multiple Dropbox accounts with the same client on a single computer, I joined my personal Dropbox account to the company one.
Later, when I left that job, the company removed me from the corporate Dropbox account. Dropbox removed all the corporate files from my local machine, and also all my personal ones. And deleted my personal files from my personal dropbox account, too. Luckily, I had another backup I was able to restore.
Now, I never link personal and corporate accounts of any kind, and stopped using Dropbox once they stopped supporting Linux.
Readit News
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.
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.
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.
We have multiple customers that send us data via OneDrive, and for all of them multi-file downloads do not work.
Microsoft's ZIP-Streamer to download multiple files simply does not work.
The text files contain exceptions with contents such as:
This is nondeterministic per file, so you have to either manually click every single file in a folder to download everything to avoid ZIP streaming (you apparently cannot use any API to download files that were just shared via link and no other auth), or repeatedly "download the ZIP to convergence" -- which is exactly as silly as it sounds.The picture browser is barely usable. Keeps scrolling back to the top. The iOS file provider sometimes doesn't respond. Downloading 500 photos locally on an iPad results in a unresponding app.
this is why a download program should verify with a hash (which should be embedded into the name of the file, or some kind of tracking metadata).
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!
On the other hand, Seafile is also a binary distributed by Chinese team, and if I was a Chinese secret service, I'd build in all the backdoors I can, which I guess already happened.
This was the reason I tried and subsequently passed on Seafile. It’s one thing if it’s just my stuff, but I was setting it up as a syncing server for friends and family. I just wasn’t comfortable with this prospect and being responsible for others’ files, as well.
Web search for Seafile turned up a GitHub repository, so seems like it's open source? That doesn't rule out the possibility of a carefully-hidden back door that no one has found yet, of course. But I think it should increase confidence over a closed-source binary distribution.
Regardless, this level of xenophobia is getting a little tiresome. If you have evidence that this project is run by or sponsored by the Chinese government, then sure, I'd find that a showstopper as well. But a group of people, who just happen to be Chinese, building something shouldn't immediately be grounds for dismissal. China is a very big place, with a truly staggering number of people, and the Chinese government -- contrary to popular belief -- doesn't have its hands in everything its citizens do.
Seafile is a much better choice if you’re only looking for FileSync (without the whole App Store thing).
Another new and already better and faster contender: ownCloud OCIS, which is a complete Go rewrite of ownCloud and is already very fast and efficient and works like a charm for file sharing.
I considered Syncthing as well, but I wanted both the arbitrary file sync and the web-based features. Figured I'd rather deal with Nextcloud's poor performance than cobble together a crappy Nextcloud clone via three separate apps.
I'm definitely keeping an eye out for OCIS though.
Just upgraded to Nextcloud 25 (literally 20 minutes ago), and no problems whatsoever.
I deployed it on a virtualized server which is not extremely powerful, and everybody seems to enjoy the productivity boost it brought into the team.
The performance is underwhelming (it's PHP after all) but we just threw CPU power at the problem...
I wonder if the issue is with Nextcloud itself, or with the particular hosting provider.
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.
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).
Source: Msft Employee
Deleted Comment
Even when it's a personal account, that feature messes up the C:\Users\username folder layout so then some apps save things into the non-OneDrive desktop folder and there's no way for an ordinary user to find them. Not to mention syncing broken program shortcuts (.lnk files) across devices and so on. This whole synchronization feature is a sysadmin nightmare slapped on top of a filesystem that wasn't designed to support it.
Seafile has a syncing client, and a drive client (Seadrive) for viewing files as if it was a shared drive.
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.
OneDrive truly is an abomination built on top of archaic Sharepoint.
[1] https://www.seafile.com/en/home/
OneDrive _for business_ is built on Sharepoint. Onedrive ... erm ... not for business (?) is an entirely separate product, and they don't interoperate.
Which is another baffling decision by Microsoft branding, since for regular users they make no distinction. It only becomes apparent when you discover you can't work with people outside the organisation.
That is oh so weirdly common in MS ecosystem... like Skype for business being Lync and being significantly worse than "just" Skype (no idea what MS teams voice chat is based tho)
You can share externally with Onedrive for business...
It's a setting in Sharepoint admin...
Once again, people here have no idea that most of their complaints with O365 is how management sets the security policy... not the platform itself...
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/turn-external-s... :)
You are right in that it used to be bad.
Groove.exe... The old Onedrive for business client was a horror
There are only very rare hiccups with binary files such as excel sheets or PSD files, where seafile will create a “SFConflict” file. Havent figured out how to fix that het.
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.
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.
I agree that objectively, it’s not much work to maintain the Synology NAS once everything is correctly set up. But I personally just got tired after attempting to configure the network access alone for the nth time. My goal was to make the NAS accessible remotely (i.e. from outside my home network) and I felt like that was already a big task (comparing different DynDNS providers, port forwarding, asking my internet provider for a static IP address). And the recurring tasks (mostly renewing certificates for the , as far as I remember) would annoy me every year or so.
And I agree with the advantages you listed about a NAS setup! That’s why I tried one out, after all. I did run into some scary security situations (once the DynDNS was set up, someone was immediately trying to log in via brute force), but nothing too major, fortunately. And I never got the network setup right (e.g. to use the local network speed when I’m home and still access my files the same way when I’m away via the internet). So, these were only theoretical advantages that I could never really get to myself (I’m sure other people figured it out, but I didn’t exactly find good documentation on these things online either).
And regarding your last point, I also generally agree! Although it feels silly to me to have a NAS at home and then still do regular backups via another storage/backup service elsewhere. I wouldn’t want to back up 1+ TB of files every day or even week, although there might be diffing solutions for that.
Anyway, I hope this answer makes it clearer why I decided against a (Synology) NAS in the end. I’m sure other peeps figured it out and are happy with their Synology setup, but for my purposes I’ve never really gotten there.
> I personally just got tired
Its true that a Synology NAS takes some effort to set up initially and a little bit of maintenance work every now and then. But I don't think about my NAS most months. And on the months I need to, it's usually a short task that I do along with other house chores.
> I did run into some scary security situations (once the DynDNS was set up, someone was immediately trying to log in via brute force)
Yes. Unfortunately, that's pretty common on the internet. You can auto-blacklist IPs after a few incorrect login attempts, and firewall-blacklist IPs out of your country in general. These two measures should almost eliminate the brute force spam, and you should be able to verify that they are effective in Log Center. However, you also have other options because you own the firewall if what I suggested doesn't make sense (like if you are traveling a lot).
> Although it feels silly to me to have a NAS at home and then still do regular backups via another storage/backup service elsewhere.
My backups are be automated with a Synology app (like Hyper Backup). It uploads only changed files. The cloud storage on Backblaze is pretty cheap - I think I pay under $2 per month. But this gives me peace of mind for the "NAS destroyed in a tornado or something" scenario. On the other hand, keeping files in a NAS gives me peace of mind that I own what I have - no cloud storage provider can take it away from me.
All in all, I'm happy you found something that works for you. I think you value simplicity and time more, and I value control over my data more. So our choices differ. In any case, I just wanted to offer context from a NAS user.
I do exactly this; a nightly backup to S3/Glacier. I use duplicity, so it only uploads diffs from the previous night. My NAS is a 4-drive RAID5 setup (RAID is not a backup!), but if I lost more than one drive -- and that has very nearly happened once -- all that data would be gone, forever. It only costs me a few bucks a month for that added peace of mind.
100% agree however that documentation is often lacking, though the OPNsense and FreeNAS docs remain pretty good.
>And regarding your last point, I also generally agree! Although it feels silly to me to have a NAS at home and then still do regular backups via another storage/backup service elsewhere. I wouldn’t want to back up 1+ TB of files every day or even week, although there might be diffing solutions for that.
Every backup solution I know off only syncs diffs, that's pretty table stakes for precisely that reason. For units that support snapshots, there are also plenty of controls for dealing with snapshot lifetimes and pruning. All of that certainly still is more upfront to setup however!
I think the big reasons for the expense and effort of a NAS though are mostly down to if you can/will make use of the speed and scale advantages. The security aspect might be a bit of a wash, one can do E2EE anyway with a typical cloud provider, and while they're more publicly exposed they've got much more serious effort behind them too. At 1TB it's probably not worth the effort. But other options definitely get more expensive as one gets into 10-20+ TB, and the value of more serious data integrity and snapshotting and so on too. 10 gigabit and even more is also getting quite reasonable to do on LAN, it's easy to saturate these days, and particularly for those of us living in rural areas with mediocre uplinks that can be genuinely handy.
I feel fortunate to though to live in a time when we all have so many options to meet our exact needs. Possible for a home or small business to put together options now that would have been top end enterprise stuff not that long ago.
My only gripe is that they do not allow Nextcloud external storage[0] but that's understandable given what they're selling.
[0]: https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/admin_manual/config...
Seems like they do now, you just have to turn it on manually.
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".
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.
[1] https://syncthing.net/
That's not really true. You can specify which files you don't want synced. So, on my phone i can say "don't send me files that match the following pattern" https://docs.syncthing.net/users/ignoring.html
So in your example you could make a subfolder "big files" and exclude that subfolder from being synchronized to your mobile device.
I also love syncthing. I've got it set up to transfer my phone's pictures to my PC where I regularly sort through them and weed them out. And I've got a shared folder that's replicated across all my devices that contains my Obsidian vault, my KeePass file and other useful things
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.
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.
Later, when I left that job, the company removed me from the corporate Dropbox account. Dropbox removed all the corporate files from my local machine, and also all my personal ones. And deleted my personal files from my personal dropbox account, too. Luckily, I had another backup I was able to restore.
Now, I never link personal and corporate accounts of any kind, and stopped using Dropbox once they stopped supporting Linux.