alt Hacker NewsI would love to like Nextcloud, it's pretty great that it does exist. Just that makes it better than... well everything else I haven't found.
What frustrates me is that it looks like it works, but once in a while it breaks in a way that is pretty much irreparable (or at least not in a practical way).
I want to run an iOS/Android app that backs up images on my server. I tried the iOS app and when it works, it's cool. It's just that once in a while I get errors like "locked webdav" files and it never seems to recover, or sometimes it just stops synchronising and the only way to recover seems to be to restart the sync from zero. It will gladly upload 80GB of pictures "for nothing", discarding each one when it arrives on the server because it already exists (or so it seems, maybe it just overwrites everything).
The thing is that I want my family to use the app, so I can't access their phone for multiple hours every 2 weeks; it has to work reliably.
If it was just for backing up my photos... well I don't need Nextcloud for that.
Again, alternatives just don't seem to exist, where I can install an app on my parent's iOS and have it synchronise their photo gallery in the background. Except I guess iCloud, that is.
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Recently people built a super-lightweigt alternative, named copyparty[0]. To me that looks like it does everything people tend to need without all the bloat.
For your specific use case of photos, Immich is the front runner and a much better experience. Sadly for the general Dropbox replacement I haven't found anything either.
For photos, you can't beat Immich.
I’ve tried every scheme under the sun and Immich is the only thing I’ve ever seen that actually works for this use case
I switch to FolderSync for the upload from mobile. Works like a charm!
I know, it sucks that the official apps are buggy as hell, but the server side is real solid
This also happened to me with my nextcloud, thankfully I did not lose any photos. I transitioned to Immich for my photos and have not looked back.
I use syncthing, I've got a folder shared between my phone, laptop and media center, and it just syncs everything easily.
SyncThing
The next cloud android app is particularly bad if you use it to back up your cameras DCIM directory then you delete the photos on your phone. It overwrite the files on Nextcloud as new photos are taken. I get why this happened but it is terrible.
I stopped using Nextcloud when the iOS app lost data.
For some reason the app disconnected from my account in the background from time to time (annoying but didn't think it was critical). Once I pasted data on Nextcloud through the Files app integration, it didn't sync because it was disconnected and didn't say anything, and it lost the data.