In my last post I wrote about the roundabout way I ended up using Nextcloud. So now: what is it, really?
Nextcloud is one of the big open-source cloud storage providers. Its headquarters are in Stuttgart, Germany. If you don’t know the platform, the name might remind you of ownCloud, which was common at a fair number of institutions for a while. I worked with ownCloud myself, at the Fraunhofer Institute in Karlsruhe. And the resemblance is no accident: Nextcloud started as a fork of ownCloud in 2016. If you like IT gossip, look up the story of Frank Karlitschek, who started ownCloud and is CEO of Nextcloud to this day.
But back to the platform, because the system is far more than just cloud storage for you to host or rent; and that is exactly what makes it interesting: Nextcloud describes itself as a secure ecosystem for collaborative open-source applications. The platform lets you add all sorts of open-source apps to your own Nextcloud. You decide which ones you need. This way, you build your own equivalent of the big platforms like Google or Microsoft. Besides storage, I use the calendar and contacts every day, I run my time tracking through Nextcloud, and I listen to music with it.
The storage side covers everything you’d want. Nextcloud runs on the phone and on the desktop (Windows, macOS, Linux), the data syncs automatically and is available offline as well. That includes automatic backup of photos. Personally, I pick which folders should be synced, and whether files live only in the cloud or also locally on the device.
The sharing options are intuitive, with decent permission management. The upload side got me a lot of positive feedback. Nextcloud makes it so easy that everyone has managed it so far, sometimes with downright euphoric reactions. Downloading is just as simple. Both matter to me, because I often swap files with people who aren’t all that tech-savvy.
There are a few things I have to mention, though. The design and UX of the browser app are old. It doesn’t look nice and it’s clumsy in places. On the mobile and desktop apps you barely notice, though.
And there are bugs that take the fun out of it. On the mobile app you can’t bulk upload manually. Instead, you pick which folders to sync, and that’s something you have to know. Enabling the folder sync isn’t very intuitive, but it’s fine once you’ve found your way around.
Sometimes, individual Nextcloud folders were no longer reachable through the Windows file system. This happens when I work on text files with agents and run other operations in the same folder in parallel. The files are never actually gone. I could always open them through the browser app, move them or rename the folder, and that fixed it. Annoying all the same. For most people, who don’t work in the file system with agents, it shouldn’t matter.
What really bugs me is the preview, again mostly for people who self-host. Nextcloud stores the photo previews as separate images, and if you don’t cap the size, the cache just keeps growing. If anyone has a fix for this: get in touch. Right now I can only view my photos inside Nextcloud itself at a very low resolution.
Despite these smaller and bigger gripes, I like using Nextcloud. The core part, storing and exchanging data, is absolutely reliable. The extra apps, which I’ll write about soon, do their job too. And I now know exactly where my data is, at any time.