What hardware do you use for Nextcloud?
I’m willing to finally get my own cloud using #Nextcloud but I have zero clue about which hardware I should choose for home storage. It would be used for domestic stuff, such as photos, music, movies and files, for the whole family, not necessarily for work
I'm running Nextcloud as a VM on Proxmox, Proxmox running on a NUC6i5SYH, with 32GB and 1TB SSD. The Nextcloud VM had 8GB of RAM assigned, which is more than enough, I think I could get away with 4. There's only two users though, so it doesn't see a lot of Intensive usage.
It's been working like a charm for me for years already.
Pi5 8GB with SSD. Only 1 user but often sharing folders with others including Memories photo sharing add on. Syncs between several machines & mobile. Also syncs Joplin notes. Pi5 also hosts variety of other (lightweight) stuff with no issues at all (Portainer, Nginx Proxy Manager, Linkwarden etc).
Previously hosted on Pi4B (4GB) with external hard drive. I've found the Pi5 + SSD faster & more robust so for me it's been a worthwhile upgrade
@fdrc_ff@selfhosted
We have a Raspberry Pi 4, and its performance is totally sufficient for photo uploads, file sync, contacts, calendar, cookbook, notes, ... Don't use just the SD card, though, but an SSD.
Cant answer for them, but if you use dietpi they have use the debian package set up with scripts to pull dependencies like a webserver and database automatically. It was very painless in my experience.
I use a relatively low spec KVM VPS on another continent. Remember, kids, if all your backups are in one location, you don't have backups. You have copies.
I used a RaspberryPi 4B for about 3 years. I connected storage over USB-3 to a pair of SATA SSDs. It handled everything pretty much flawlessly for two users and half a dozen devices. We even had multiple users on Plex. dietpi was brilliant for my first home server :).
Initial uploads may be slow depending on your storage layout but in my experience the requirements are super low.
I just bought a used Intel N100 mini pc with 16gb RAM and 2tb SSD for a little more than I would have paid for a Raspberry Pi 5 setup. It doesn’t draw much more power than a RPi, and I’m not limited to what’s available for ARM if I want to expand the install at some point.
before you take the jump, consider a way lighter and easier alternative - syncthing (files) and radicale (calendar, contacts). dependable, bullet-proof, super-lightweight, zero issues - everything nextcloud isn't.
I was the happiest when I finally booted nextcloud off my network, never to return.
I do regularly have issues with radicale, for years now. One is that it does not work properly after boot. I have to SSH in, kill the radicale process, and restart it.
I've got a small Enterprise customer running on a Dell r710, 2gb ram to the slightly custom docker image for nc, 4gb+ for the woods sit, the other 14gb to KVM to run a windows application.
My NextCloud is running on an old desktop that's been repurposed into a server. The server is running Proxmox, and NC is running in docker directly on Proxmox using the nextcloud-aio image.
Found that had better performance than running it in a VM and was less headaches than the other install options.
I keep thinking about moving it to dedicated hardware, say some sort of mini pc, but it hasn't been a high priority for me.
I do this but in a docker VM. Then I can snapshot and back it up. I haven't noticed any performance disadvantage since it's running as a KVM guest, so it's pretty much the same are running on bare metal.
When I was first playing with NC I was using a RPi3 with an external SSD for a drive. Performance was pretty good, but as soon as I tried the same setup in a VM, the performance tanked. The only way I found to avoid the performance penalty was a manual install like it was bare metal, which I didn't really want to do. My experience with such setups is that they tend to be brittle.
My understanding was that the performance penalty was caused by the chain of VMs. Proxmox --> Ubuntu VM --> Docker. I don't know enough about it to say for sure.
My home server is a refurbished HP t630 thin client with 8 gb of ram and a 1tb SSD. I'm running various services, Nextcloud-AIO being one of them. I bought it for € 35 plus the SSD and a 4 gb ram extension. I definitely do recommend used hardware as it is usually cheaper, more powerful and more environmentally friendly than buying something new. Wouldn't trust a used SSD though.
Really, anything works. I use a decade old desktop that in it's prime was used for MS Office and emails, so if that thing runs smoothly, I think anything will.
I'm currently using an i5 9500 and it runs good here too.
Note for OP though: If you don't need/want transcoding it'd be way cheaper to get an equivalent AMD CPU just because motherboards are hilariously expensive for an obsolete platform.
My Nextcloud journey went from a Raspberry Pi 2B with a single USB HDD over a Pi 3B to a QNAP 2bay NAS on RAID 1 with a proper backup strategy including daily encrypted cloud backup.
Having come to rely on the setup much more than when I was starting out playing with it years ago, I sleep much easier now. That said, I never lost any data, even on very questionable hardware without any redundancy whatsoever.
My NAS, which is my old PC. Ryzen 1700 w/16 GB of RAM, which is way overkill (just need like 2 cores and 4GB RAM or so).
Hardware isn't particularly important, NC isn't all that heavy. If you're using Collabora or OnlyOffice or something, you may need to care a bit. Use what you have, and upgrade when you run into issues.
That said, I'm considering switching to Seafile because it can apparently do Collabora now. I don't use any of the NC features, I just want a Google Docs replacement.
Mine is running on a HP 600 G1 Micro Computer Mini Tower PC. Right now, less than $80 from Bezos. It's over powered for Nextcloud alone, but I've also got other services running on it, including Jellyfin.
It zips along quite nicely, but I've also followed the guides for tuning the server for best performance.
I have an 8 gig RPi4 (OS is Dietpi) with a 16 terabyte HDD for storage. No issues at all...super fast and reliable. There are great FOSS apps on F-Droid covering just about anything you'd need...the official app, cookbook, bookmarks, notes, news, etc. If you're using an HDD instead of an SSD, just make sure you have a dedicated power supply for the HDD.
For your usecase a pi should be sufficient. You can go with a pi 5 8GB and a docker install, so you can host more stuff later.
I would recommend an m.2 head with an SSD instead of an SD card though. Much faster and more reliable.
Nextcloud sucks. Its better to have discreet docker services running for what you actually need vs nextcloud being a monolith of shitty plugins. As for hardware, go on eBay and buy a cheap optiplex tower. It'll get you started.
I know it's unpopular, but I'm starting to agree with you. I set up NextCloud, but I honestly don't use much of any of it. The only part I really want is the file sync and handling, as well as LibreOffice in the cloud. I don't care about the calendar, contacts sync, video chat, etc. I looked through the plugins, and the ones I tried kind of sucked. I also really don't like PHP and the Docker image is all wrong, so it's more of a pain than anything to deal with.
So I'm trying out Seafile. I didn't realize it supports Collabora CODE, so I'm going to check that out. My main hangup is the directory structure, so I'll figure out the FUSE FS thing and see if that'll work well enough for me.
I literally just want to be able to send stuff from our machines, view/edit them online quickly, and send the important stuff to an offline backup.
Who knows, maybe I'll like it, and maybe I'll come back to NextCloud. Either way, I highly recommend people try out alternatives, because there really are a lot of cool projects out there.
People are down voting me because they've pledged their soul to the monolith of shitty plugins.
Even if you want all the pieces there's way better versions of them than what you get in nextcloud. Also depending on how many devices you need libreoffice on, might be easier just to run a syncthings instance and sync the files that way. Its what I'm doing for obsidian and its awesome.
Alternatively theres also this but I can't vouch for it as I haven't set it up yet
I switched from nextcloud to seafile. Their app has paid file search for android app. Also full text search is paid. The docker also seems to crash a lot.
I've been testing owncloud ocis and it works really well. Just trying to figure out a few things for single sign on, but the app otherwise works really well.