Rant on nextcloud

I apologize if this is inappropriate, I just wanted to vent… this is the 3d time nextcloud bails on me, other times it just stopped working but today, first time on nixos, it actually deleted the data..files folders along with all the photos from the last 6 years… I can recover the photos, I believe I have them all in my 2nd storage, but it will take some time and it just makes me really want to find an alternative.
Nextcloud looks like a great project, when it works its great! but 3 times is too much… for some reason the owner of the data/ folder was my user which is member of the nextcloud group, everything had been working fine but I thought it should belong to nextcloud, oh my… silly me, I chowned to nextcloud… dont fix what aint broken am I right?.. I stat-ed the folder and I believe this is what triggered it… sure I was doing rebuild-switch and maybe that did it… but it would’ve done it anyways later on… just incredibly frustrating that I cant trust nextcloud… its always something heartbreaking with this thing…

rant over… apologies for the negativity

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As far as alternatives for photos, check out 📸 Free and OpenSource Photo Libraries | foss_photo_libraries
(The table can be scrolled left/right as well, it’s an odd layout.)

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Or the excellent https://immich.app which has brand-spanking new integration in NixOS.

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Yes, immich is listed there. I use it myself, but beware data loss (which I experienced once, and which immich explicitly warns about anyway). In other words, don’t consider immich to be a backup (which is always the case for any application, of course.)

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(Maintainer of services.nextcloud talking).

First of all, sorry for the inconvenice. And I agree, this shouldn’t happen.

I’m not sure however if it’s actually Nextcloud that is at fault or something that went wrong upon your last switch. If I understood it correctly, you chowned the user(?) of the data directory to something else and did a nixos-rebuild switch?

Do you have any logs left from that? I’d be curious to see what has happened to make sure that if there’s something to be fixed in our module, we do so.

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I’ve been meaning to switch from nextcloud for a while, too, mostly because its sync performance is pretty terrible and it eats server storage, but I’ve not really had other issues with it in the 10 years I’ve been running it.

That said, if you need cloud file storage for non-images, seafile looks pretty good.

For me the main blockers are lack of postgres support and the weird thing where it handles user encryption secrets used for the browser client on the server end (though with nextcloud there is no e2e encryption at all, so maybe I shouldn’t treat that as an issue…).

I also sadly had to pin nextcloud due to some recent update, similar to the issue in nextcloud: Argument #2 ($key) cannot be empty in file... · Issue #253536 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub. I guess I will just have to reinstall some time soon.