Lots of talk about must‑have features and backups here...
BUT there's another piece that makes or breaks these tools... whether they can build a community around them and stick around for years...
Open‑source cloud storage projects come and go when maintainers burn out... a sustainable business model or strong contributor base matters as much as technical checklists...
ALSO interoperability is underrated... if your drive can speak WebDAV or S3 and plug into existing identity systems, teams are more likely to try it...
In the end people want something that won't vanish after the honeymoon... that's harder than adding a progress bar...
Is that a weakness of the tool's organizational model?
I don't want to be part of a community around my cloud storage. I want it to work and I want to think about it as little as possible.
I use Syncthing and it does a pretty great job at this, no one ever insisted I need to join a Syncthing community, yet it keeps on working.
I don't pay a dime for Syncthing but I'm vaguely aware that they're linked to a company called Kastelo which provides enterprise support for Syncthing deployments. Probably a lot of Syncthing development is paid for that way.
Incidentally I founded an open source consulting company that's totally unrelated to cloud storage. We have enterprise as well as smaller contracts. We develop some addons in-house and the bigger enterprise contracts tend to subsidize most of the work that goes into them. We haven't asked anyone to be part of a community and I don't think we need to.
Communities are nice, but if you want your software to last I think a good business model and a good marketing strategy are a better bet. Bonus, you can quit your day job.
For a business headed open source project, it's still about the community. In this case, the business tends to take a defining and often controlling role in the community. This has plusses and minuses. On the plus side, if a business has a vested financial interest in the project, there is financial incentive for continuity. On the minus, when the company's financial interest no longer aligns with the community, many of us retain scars from rug pulling and switcheroos.
So understanding the long term stability of a community is more than just checking whether there is a company backing the project. It is important to analyze the nature and diversity of interest. I think it's just as important that there exists a larger community that the business depends on for extra feature + bugfixing work which is capable of forking. When this is possible, it is much less likely to be necessary.
Indeed. "S3 compatible" is the state of the art for object storage imho. As long as you can talk to a storage system that supports the basic S3 primitives, longevity is improved and there is no lock in. You can use S3 proper, Backblaze, Wasabi, Backblaze B2, local storage exposing an S3 api, etc. Any replacement is mostly drop in assuming it can read, scan, index existing objects.
- Cryptomator (https://cryptomator.org/) to crypt/decrypt sensible directories
(that are synchronized through Syncthing)
Cryptomator allow me to access also the directories via webdav
- MaterialFiles on Andrid to access the files on the server
I access my mini server from outside with a Wireguard VPN created on my Fritz!Box router.
Between home and office I created a site-to-site Wireguard VPN between the two Fritz!Box routers.
Seafile is the only good enough thing i've found so far for self-hosted file sync. But it is still a pain to upgrade the server version. nextCloud and friends is a complete disaster in my oppinion.
> nextCloud and friends is a complete disaster in my oppinion.
Why is that?
Have been using NextCloud in our company and for myself, and I couldn't be happier, no issues since 3 years, all the tools and plugins I need, sync running perfect and hassle-free and performant. I thought it's generally liked up until now - I didn't try any of the alternatives though, so they might indeed be better. Though I don't have any reason to try them tbh, as NC works almost too well.
Using Nextcloud on the web feels like a state of the art 2015 PHP web UI. It is... fine. But compare it to immich for example and they're just not playing in the same league imo
Theres a lot of weird setup often required on the backend in my experience, but when it works, it works well. But until you get everything dialed in it can have weird issues that don't have a clear path to fix them.
It might be better in their weird AIO solution? But i dont like the idea of giving a docker container the ability to spawn more containers. I just use one of their normal docker containers and have had to manually change a lot to make it work as they actually suggest. Like just recently i setup their notify_push plugin as it improves performance - but the provided setup instructions didn't work in my setup and i had to manually tweak several things.
Resilio is also pretty good, depending on your use case. (Syncthing is great too, but Resilio seems faster and better at NAT traversal in my experience.)
I recently got into self-hosting Seafile and successfully set it up on my dedicated server. Had to think backup and security strategies quite a bit and ultimately I set up a bulletproof backup mechanism. Tested it pretty rigorously.
Seafile took me by surprise in terms of how quick it was at picking up new files and changes - syncing works incredibly well too. I moved all my files from my Google Drive into my Seafile instance and I'm now using it on all my devices as my main cloud storage solution.
Nextcloud suffers from flexibility, it's got a lot to offer but requires dialling in to your specific use case, the mistake most admins is to assume you can just run it without tuning, it has too many differing options to do that smoothly out of the box.
The ability to just run it in a snap has really contributed to this imho, Nextcloud is enterprise software you just happen to be able to run in your homelab.
I desperately want to be a fan of ownCloud, because it offers clients natively across Mac/Linux/mobile, but it’s such a mess. Every platform has small bugs and reliability problems that makes the whole thing useless.
If you just need a web interface to your filesystem, there’s this single Go executable (https://github.com/filebrowser/filebrowser) that supports sharing and minimal user management.
I've run a self-hosted Nextcloud instance for many years and Docker is by far the easiest. I started off with a native installation and that can be a pain when upgrading the OS (Ubuntu in my case). I tried the snap version when that became available and was impressed by how easy it was, though administering it required a bit of learning as the file locations where all different.
Running it in Docker made it so much easier to administer (maybe add in the missing db indexes if there's a major version change).
If you want, I can paste my docker-compose.yml for reference as it's relatively complex.
Open source drive tools live or die on three things.
1) Simple sync that never surprises.
2) Clean conflict handling you can explain to a non tech friend.
3) And zero drama upgrades.
If Twake nails those and keeps a sane on prem story with S3 and LDAP, it has a shot. The harder part is trust and docs. Clear threat model. Crisp migration guides from Drive and Dropbox. And a tiny CLI that just works on a headless box. Do these and teams will try it for real work, not just weekend tests.
I'd add a fourth; "Make it easy to do backups and verify they're correct".
I don't think I've ever considered a data store without that being one of my top concerns. This anxiety comes from real-life experience where the business I worked at had backups enabled for the primary data store for years, but when something finally happened and we lost some production data, we quickly discovered that the backups weren't actually possible to restore from, and had been corrupted this whole time.
Heh - I once made a little chunk of change, because a former client from 10-years previous discovered the shiny "DVD/CD" backups had succumbed to "bit-rot" and needed some source code.
I grabbed the hard-drive off the shelf, put it in an enclosure and handed them the source-code... (At the time, every time I upgraded my system, I would just keep my old drives, so... had a stack of them - buy a new external enclosure, slot it and park it.)
I'd like a manual "sync now" option. Sometimes I put stuff in google drive using windows explorer and it's not immediately obvious if it is syncing, why it is or isn't, or what I need to do to make it.
I've got a theory that progress bars for main functionality tasks and the associated manual triggers in modern software are out of favor, as it creates a stage for an error to be displayed and creates expectations the customer can lean on. Less detail in errors displayed to the customer removes their ability to identify a software problem as unique or shared among others.
Syncing should be in the control of users. user should be able to trigger or abort the sync. Also it should provide some sort of indicator of progress.
58.9% TypeScript and 32.6% JavaScript wouldn't be my first preference to implement such a high performance and throughput demanding application? Why is that?
A bit off-topic, but is there a way I can convince various apps (Viber, WhatsApp) to use some replacement instead of Google Drive for backup? They do not offer such an option, but maybe by rooting the phone and faking the interface, or ...?
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BUT there's another piece that makes or breaks these tools... whether they can build a community around them and stick around for years...
Open‑source cloud storage projects come and go when maintainers burn out... a sustainable business model or strong contributor base matters as much as technical checklists...
ALSO interoperability is underrated... if your drive can speak WebDAV or S3 and plug into existing identity systems, teams are more likely to try it...
In the end people want something that won't vanish after the honeymoon... that's harder than adding a progress bar...
I don't want to be part of a community around my cloud storage. I want it to work and I want to think about it as little as possible.
I use Syncthing and it does a pretty great job at this, no one ever insisted I need to join a Syncthing community, yet it keeps on working.
I don't pay a dime for Syncthing but I'm vaguely aware that they're linked to a company called Kastelo which provides enterprise support for Syncthing deployments. Probably a lot of Syncthing development is paid for that way.
Incidentally I founded an open source consulting company that's totally unrelated to cloud storage. We have enterprise as well as smaller contracts. We develop some addons in-house and the bigger enterprise contracts tend to subsidize most of the work that goes into them. We haven't asked anyone to be part of a community and I don't think we need to.
Communities are nice, but if you want your software to last I think a good business model and a good marketing strategy are a better bet. Bonus, you can quit your day job.
So understanding the long term stability of a community is more than just checking whether there is a company backing the project. It is important to analyze the nature and diversity of interest. I think it's just as important that there exists a larger community that the business depends on for extra feature + bugfixing work which is capable of forking. When this is possible, it is much less likely to be necessary.
Edit: @n3t heard wrt to the turn of phrase
Why ? who cares? if the tool solves the problem, you need a community maintain it. And that's it.
I use : - Syncthing (https://syncthing.net/) to keep the files synchronized between desktops and laptops computers
- Webdav (https://github.com/hacdias/webdav) to access the files on the server via other applications
- Cryptomator (https://cryptomator.org/) to crypt/decrypt sensible directories (that are synchronized through Syncthing) Cryptomator allow me to access also the directories via webdav
- MaterialFiles on Andrid to access the files on the server
I access my mini server from outside with a Wireguard VPN created on my Fritz!Box router.
Between home and office I created a site-to-site Wireguard VPN between the two Fritz!Box routers.
Why is that? Have been using NextCloud in our company and for myself, and I couldn't be happier, no issues since 3 years, all the tools and plugins I need, sync running perfect and hassle-free and performant. I thought it's generally liked up until now - I didn't try any of the alternatives though, so they might indeed be better. Though I don't have any reason to try them tbh, as NC works almost too well.
It might be better in their weird AIO solution? But i dont like the idea of giving a docker container the ability to spawn more containers. I just use one of their normal docker containers and have had to manually change a lot to make it work as they actually suggest. Like just recently i setup their notify_push plugin as it improves performance - but the provided setup instructions didn't work in my setup and i had to manually tweak several things.
Seafile took me by surprise in terms of how quick it was at picking up new files and changes - syncing works incredibly well too. I moved all my files from my Google Drive into my Seafile instance and I'm now using it on all my devices as my main cloud storage solution.
The ability to just run it in a snap has really contributed to this imho, Nextcloud is enterprise software you just happen to be able to run in your homelab.
Been a user for around a decade. It is really great. Nextcloud was choking on large repos back in the day and it requires a beefier machine.
I first run Seafile on a cheap ARM board with 2GB ram and 2 core CPU.
Running it in Docker made it so much easier to administer (maybe add in the missing db indexes if there's a major version change).
If you want, I can paste my docker-compose.yml for reference as it's relatively complex.
Overall it's no WordPress instance that works everywhere.
That’s all!
Auto updates and I can bet it will not break.
Deleted Comment
If Twake nails those and keeps a sane on prem story with S3 and LDAP, it has a shot. The harder part is trust and docs. Clear threat model. Crisp migration guides from Drive and Dropbox. And a tiny CLI that just works on a headless box. Do these and teams will try it for real work, not just weekend tests.
I don't think I've ever considered a data store without that being one of my top concerns. This anxiety comes from real-life experience where the business I worked at had backups enabled for the primary data store for years, but when something finally happened and we lost some production data, we quickly discovered that the backups weren't actually possible to restore from, and had been corrupted this whole time.
I grabbed the hard-drive off the shelf, put it in an enclosure and handed them the source-code... (At the time, every time I upgraded my system, I would just keep my old drives, so... had a stack of them - buy a new external enclosure, slot it and park it.)
"Something went wrong!"
Isn't that just 91.5% JavaScript?
TypeScript is not real.
Personally I separate church and state by writing tests in JS and application code in TS.
If you're asking why these languages at all when this and that other language is faster, most likely it's less of a bottleneck than estimated.
With clients some of them have already made this bad decision; with my own personal files I get to avoid it.
And then I saw Npm references and thought “in JavaScript?!” But at least it’s typescript.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45694376