Selfhosted
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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My next 'system' I'm eyeing is Peergos!
It's fairly clunky. The developer is a nice guy and responds really quickly, but files sometimes didn't sync and I got an error twice where it just didn't sync anymore.
There also isn't a proper setup guide or documentation (but you can always add the help flag halfway through your jar usage to know what parameters you're missing). The developer has been kind enough to help me through that though.
It might just be a skill issue on my end of course. Though needless to say I moved back to something else after a couple of months (In my case to Seafile)
Also its Dutch translation is acceptable (I did that)
@pixeldaemon Syncthing. We have one "authoritative" fileserver running syncthing, and then a bunch of "clients" (laptops, phones) that sync up to the fileserver. This doesn't work for, say, terabytes of movies/music, but for important stuff like photos/tax records/whatever, it means we can make changes on any "client" and it gets synced to the "server" and all the other "clients"
For more traditional cloud, I recently installed copyparty (https://github.com/9001/copyparty) w/ https://github.com/romaan7/white-gold-theme-for-copyparty
@pixeldaemon I used to use Seafile, but it is clunky and annoying, and it will also never ever be in debian due to upstream copyright sketchiness.
I currently use NextCloud, but I have been looking to move away from it. My main use case is for syncing photos and videos to the cloud from my phone (Android) and this used to work flawlessly. But, some time in early 2025, it just stopped working. I can still manually upload files and sync still works for other folders (e.g. Documents) just fine. But, photos and videos just won't sync automatically. Not sure if there are other options which would work better, but NextCloud on Android just seems to be broke.
The just stopped working was the client stopped syncing? NextCloud decided to stop allow private made certificates with its client in 2025 and its what made me switch. I went to Syncthing which works well and is a lot faster and less resource intensive than NextCloud. I also had to move my calendars and chat as well.
The just stopped working was the client stopped syncing?
The client doesn't seem to detect new photos as they are created/taken. If I manually upload an image from my photos folder, it syncs just fine. Files in other folders seem to sync just fine. But, photos and videos just never even try to sync.
NextCloud decided to stop allow private made certificates with its client in 2025 and its what made me switch.
This hasn't been an issue for me. I pay for a domain and have a certificate issued by Let's Encrypt. The only certificate errors I get are when I refresh the certificate every 6 months, and that's just the client asking me if I want to trust the new certificate.
Syncthing
I had looked into this a while back, but it seemed to be more of a point to point solution and not a client-server system. I was aiming to have an authoritative server with everything and clients (both phone and desktop) able to pull the needed/request files. I also like the ability to share via a web link when needed. Am I wrong in that understanding?
A computer.
opencloud, i just moved from nextcloud and wow, the performance is insane.
Wanted to use open cloud but they archived their helm chart. Very niche I know, but still a shame
Nextcloud. It does the job well enough.
It took about 2 days of using nextcloud files across devices to experience unreliable syncing from Nextcloud on Android.
I installed folder sync pro on android and that has helped a lot, but it still irks me to use 2 tools when 1 should do the job.
I actually moved away from classical self-hosted cloud storage solutions after trying the usual suspects like opencloud, nextcloud etc.
And for me the time and effort (also the ressource-hogging if you don't use quite overpowered servers) just weren't worth it. Not when the used interfaces most of the time are open standards anyway and simpler solutions do the job:
Radicale for contacts and dates via a webdav subset. Webdav concidently being widely supported for integrating online storage into any filesystem (or as the backend for several other things like for example syncing my bookmarks over several devices and browsers). SFTP or the million tools being just a frontend for it.
One shiny platform like for example Nextcloud to do it all might be nice for a lot of users when they have someone dedicated to maintain it. But for selfhosting (as in: mainly for myself) the constant attention needed to fix stuff was quite tedious.
When I think of "Google Drive" or "Dropbox" alternatives nowadays it's just a drive hooked up to some low-spec device and accessed via one (or several) already existing open standards.
(Bonus point: that lost phone is simply cut off by deleting its keys - unlike so many dedicated platform where you have to manage -if you even can- multiple dedicated users and their rights just to easily separate your personal access from your devices that are by design not all equally secure.)
I run Nextcloud all-in-one containers and I literally have to do nothing, ever, to manage it.
One shiny platform like for example Nextcloud to do it all might be nice for a lot of users when they have someone dedicated to maintain it. But for selfhosting (as in: mainly for myself) the constant attention needed to fix stuff was quite tedious.
I have run nextcloud for many years, I would love to know what this "constant attention" you talk about is.
Occasionally I need to run an "occ" command after an install to fix some indexes, but other than that I don't do much?
Occasionally I need to run an “occ” command after an install to fix some indexes
That then fails and breaks it (in about 1 out of 3 cases). Which requires rolling back everything, running the commands again pre-update, then updating and praying to not have to do another re-install (~ 1 out of 5).
Yeah, over the past 5 years or so I can't say I've had to do a lot with it either. There was a time I accidentally nuked it, but that's why I had a backup.
I set up Nextcloud with RPi4 based RAID NAS. Via sftp as apparently it is not really that much slower and NFS felt weird to me
I bet my answer is going to be the least interesting one but let's represent casuals too ;)
Keep it simple, stupid my friend :D
Well, now I see that I'm going to move to have sshfs instead. There are issues with spamming sftp connections for all the small files. But in general I've learned that really "done is better than perfect". Just make it work, observe, iterate
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| NAS | Network-Attached Storage |
| NFS | Network File System, a Unix-based file-sharing protocol known for performance and efficiency |
| RAID | Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage |
| SFTP | Secure File Transfer Protocol for encrypted file transfer, over SSH |
| SSH | Secure Shell for remote terminal access |
4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 8 acronyms.
[Thread #303 for this comm, first seen 20th May 2026, 10:10] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Synchthing if I want local copies, otherwise I just mount sshfs shares from my nas (using sftpman as a helper)
some mix of sftp, nfs and copyparty
Filebrowser quantum is really good! Easy to setup and use.
Tried Seafile, Nextcloud, and Filebrowser Quantum. Nextcloud won out, although FBQ with a few files for select individuals does remain.
Syncthing for files, Nextcloud (synced to fastmail and file tree using vdirsyncer) for calendar and contacts.
I set up Opencloud to give it a try, set up to sync my photo folder from my phone, meaning to just spin it up and then delete it. I then got called out of the house on an errand and forgot all about it until 4 weeks later when I redid my WireGuard settings. While the tunnel was failing to connect I got complaints about it not being able to find the server, I knew I had fixed it once it stopped popping error messages at me. Just checked and there is 1.3gb of photos in there I never noticed it syncing. It was a bit of a nuisance to get going but seems to just run as a spot to throw a bunch of files and access them on the go. At least based on my accidental 4 week impact assessment.
I feel like I'm doing something wrong by just using smb, what fratures do everybody use and need from cloud storage other than a folder you and your apps can access? File sync aside (I don't think I need it and if I did I know how to use syncthing)