It would be really nice to have a guide how to self-host Nextcloud at home on your own hardware. Perhaps as a blog article? Or a knowledge base article?
There’s several guides for setting up Nextcloud out there but they’re often not very good or they completely disregard privacy (e.g. hosting on some VPS) or reliability (e.g. recommending the buggy E2EE app). I think these points would be very relevant for anyone trying to set up their Nextcloud home server:
what kind of hardware to get (not using too much electricity, not too expensive to buy, powerful enough to run Nextcloud including multiple users accessing it at the same time or running the CollaboraOffice or OnlyOffice web apps)
recommended OS and settings (definitely should use full-disk encryption, most likely Linux, but then the questions is which distro - something “up to date” for security patches or some LTS distro for more reliability?)
best way to make your server accessible from the Internet on home ISP (via DynDNS service or own domain), both in terms of ease of setup, security, and privacy (e.g. Cloudflare Tunnel seems to be an easy solution for a reverse proxy but apparently is able to MITM your connection?)
most hassle-free way to install and Nextcloud (for example: ‘All-in-One’ Docker image? Nextcloud Snap?) and whatever else needs to be installed separately (HTTP server, reverse proxy, let’s encrypt)
how to update Nextcloud, how to roll back an update if something breaks (without losing files and other data), and any other maintenance tasks
how to do backups of your Nextcloud server, how to back up and restore files to protect from hardware failure, recommended ways to do encrypted offsite backups
I realise that it would be a long, big article and not something for one person to do on their own. And unfortunately I don’t have the expertise to do it myself. But I think it would be very valuable to have such a tutorial because what could be more private than hosting your own cloud in your own house on your own hardware?
I think it would be too monumental of a task to put together such a guide especially given it would really tread the line of what is in scope for Privacy Guides.
While it’s technically possible to host Nextcloud on your main computer or even a smartphone, it will not provide you with anything usable.A dedicated server or specific hardware is generally a better choice for reliability, security, and scalability.
It sounds like you’re very new in this area. I’d recommend taking some time to learn about privacy basics and using hosted services before looking into more advanced topics like this. Otherwise, you can set yourself up for failure.
Nextcloud is a terrible bloated app. I wouldn’t recommend it to others as it is right now because it seems too fragile and frequently breaks with updates, most especially if installed as an App on something like TrueNAS Scale. I have given up on it completely.
It is hard to install as a pure stand alone app in a server OS. The only decently convenient and fast enough way to install it as a bare metal install is via snap. But managing configurations as a snap is somewhat harder than the bare metal install when you go online and search for configs and troubleshooting because they mostly refer to the standalone install configs.
There are also cruft if you look under the hood and it really builds up over time. With the maturity of a toddler, Nextcloud cant seem to clean itself afterwards when it encounter errors. I have mysterious drive usage with a more or less empty Nextcloud after install and reinstalling it. Transferring large files oftentimes seem to cut off for no real reason if you are not on an Intel networking device (that’s you Realtek).
Youtube is also a terrible way to learn to install because a new update may invalidate the steps to install. I also think most of us here do not want to be a Nextcloud tech support, considering its current state. While I know some of us are technical here, I think guides to installing Nextcloud should be left with official Nextcloud forum or elsewhere.
I have to agree, unfortunately. I have never personally had a Nextcloud installation that I’ve liked, and I’ve installed it several times (including a recent trial just a month or so ago).
Nextcloud is listed because it is immensely popular among many other self-hosters, and this isn’t Jonah’s Privacy Guides. However, I am not interested in writing a Nextcloud guide, so if anything were to happen on that front it won’t be from me.
Imo if self-hosted options were recommended by PG, I’d at least expect them to encrypt stored data. Nextcloud has a deeply flawed e2ee implementation which should disqualify it.
Fair, this decision would ultimately depend on your threat model. Encryption would still be helpful in preventing a thief or law enforcement from accessing the data.
I don’t think it ever will be. It isnt quite what it is for. Nextcloud in my eyes is just the open source equivalent of microsoft sharepoint. It is not something you want to admin yourself unless you are paid to do so.
Before proton drive was usable, I have actually used Nextcloud and I have had my fair share of issues managing it. It has gotten better but really is not fool proof. It is not suited for most people.