Nextcloud - use cases

  1. https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/news
  2. https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/calendar

NextCloud is the “everything” app. It’s your central data storage, calendar, chat, office suite, email app…

It’s easier to use NC than it is to set up 10 individual apps to do the same. But NC definitely has problems (slow & buggy). The latest release is a little bit less slow, but they have a long way to go. At this point I don’t think they will ever come up with any serious solutions and instead keep building more features.

For one, an iOS app. Also, it isn’t really painful if you use ncp or aio. NextCloud is a useful webDAV/calDAV backend. It is a great backend for Tasks. You can get better performance out of syncing by using syncthing alongside nextcloud.

There is a portion of people that want a google drive/photos replacement. Nextcloud offers that and I dont know any other software offering that besides owncloud. Im not really happy with nextcloud because it’s bloated/slow and uses a ton of cpu power for image/video thumbnail creation.

There is a whole set of awesome tools that are easy to set up once you have NextCloud running anyway.

It’s great so sync files over multiple devices.

  1. File sync across all kinds of devices
  2. Photo upload right from your phone into your cloud folder, complete with a great app to display for photo library, NC Photos
  3. A lean and useful note taking app, NC notes
  4. Great tasks apps, either NC Tasks or NC Deck
  5. A very good RSS aggregater with NC News
  6. A fully self-hosted groupware solution with emails (via imap/smtp), contacts and calendar neatly under one UI, complete with a caldav/carddav server
  7. A bookmark manager that automatically can take screenshots of the websites you store there and even checks for dead links and reports them

Can you find other software that does these things, even with a faster UI? Sure you can, at least for most of them. But it’s way more complicated and for some of them, it might even be impossible. For example, I haven’t found a decent self-hosted solution to replace NC groupware yet, and the common photo apps (Photoprism, Immich etc.) don’t fit my usage nearly as well as NC Files + NC Photos (or potentially NC Files + Photoview, as they are extremely similar).

I use NC for:

  1. file storage and sync to cross platform clients
  2. calendar sharing and external subscriptions (sync with caldav client)
  3. tasks (note the web ui doesn’t support reoccurring tasks yet - but you can sync them with other clients)
  4. Contacts (sync with any cardiac client)
  5. cookbook (recipes)
  6. photos (don’t use the built in app - use the Memories app!)
  7. maps (only use it for favorite locations and photo mapping - directions are not worth while)
  8. deck (kanban style project management which integrates with tasks)
  9. Talk (for family calls - must use turn server - there is a free open turn server)
  10. collabora office for all document editing
  11. Mail - this is slow but it works in a pinch (round cube can also be used for a more full featured Webmail experience)

To run nextcloud smoothly:

  1. have plenty of ram (I use 4gb)
  2. follow the tuning guide in the docs
  3. don’t upgrade immediately
  4. use a guided install method (I use the Nextcloud VM which has many automatic installer scripts for the more difficult configurations)
  5. make sure to use caching, and generate previews.
  6. recognize app is great for auto-tagging photos/files
  7. if managing things for family, use the impersonate app to help troubleshoot for them
  8. be sure to have backups! Also snapshot before each update so you can easily rollback if things go bad.

I use it pretty much exclusively for synchronizing photos I take from my smartphone at the moment. For that purpose alone it has been pretty useful, since I am trying to ween myself off of relying on Google Photos for my photography storage.

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