When I finally lost access to my old college Microsoft account, off went my OneDrive aswell. I had a .bat that ran at regular intervals to back up any changes to a separate folder on my server in preparations for that day. My use of the OneDrive features never expanded much past keeping my Dungeons and Dragons notes and enabling the quick ability to transfer items from my phone to one of my computers
I was already on my way of self-hosting a small plethora of apps so I figured I would move forward with hosting my own cloud storage. I upgraded my server to have 2 more 4tb drives and set up a 500GB Virtual Box VM running on the latest version of Ubuntu server. Finished updating and installing docker, applying my .bash_aliases tweaks and we were off.
NextCloud
NextCloud was being touted as the go to cloud storage option anywhere I looked. To be honest, I didn’t hear much about any other app aside from SyncThing which was a little too simple for my needs. Looking for a File Explorer integration as well as a way to access from the web, NextCloud seemed like the no brainer option. Once I got it setup, which was relatively easy with the docker-compose example provided on their Docker Hub page I started installing and setting it up on my machines. I did grow tired of the restarts that were needed with every upgrade, though over all the system was solid and I never ran into any issues after setting it up.
NextCloud is expansive. There are so many apps that you can add into the system that I’m sure you could mold it into the environment that really suites you. With that convenience comes bloat and a larger footprint, which is totally offset if you need all of the different apps and features that are offered. This did cause normal interaction with the web browser experience a bit more sluggish than I’d like. For a small business environment or just a small team, I feel like it’d be hard to argue with NextCloud in terms of a Microsoft Office replacement.
I mostly used CloudFlare tunnels to access my NextCloud instance. While a viable solution, I wanted to remove my data filtering through CloudFlare and slowly migrate away from using CloudFlare tunnels in my environment; After having a hell of a time trying to combine my install of NextCloud and NGINX Proxy Manager, I figured it wouldn’t be a bad time to look into alternative solutions and examine what was on the field at this time.
SeaFile
After I had some frustrations setting up NextCloud with NPM and without a CloudFlare tunnel, I started looking around again and came upon SeaFile with some reccomendations and posts quite like this one on Reddit. Users spoke of it as a faster NextCloud without all of the features that I wasn’t using anyway. Sounded perfect to me. Set up of SeaFile was even easier than NextCloud and I was ready to go in almost no time with NPM allowing access in. I was instantly surprised by the uptick in speed with SeaFile, from accessing the web browser to uploading files.
The interface was nice and simple. SeaFile offers a drive integration as well as a full app for your system. Of course, both systems offer 2FA which is a must on any publicly accessible service, as far as I’m concerned. SeaFile really is just built for file sharing and for that, it fit my needs much better. Of course that may not be the case for everyone, especially if you’re looking for something to replace an office environment of you need those features.
I’ll do my best to run any updates as time goes on; I’ve only been running SeaFile now for a week or so. No issues this far though and everything is looking up in the cloud storage department.
