OwnCloud vs. NextCloud (or Something Else)

[Nick H. Supervisor]

Hi all,

I'm finally getting round to converting my old laptop into a cloud server for files, and I've got a question that I think should be easy enough to answer...I just can't seem to find a definite answer from my research.

I need to be able to create users for the cloud server access, so that I can give person 1 access to folder A, B and C, but person 2 can only access folder B and C.

Now I've seen that OwnCloud seems to offer this functionality, but I've also seen people saying how NextCloud is a fork of OwnCloud that offers better functionality...without stipulating that it offers this user control that I'm looking for.

I tried fiddling around with the setup of OwnCloud today, but I kept hitting certain roadblocks. I know you're probably going to ask what those were, but before I continue down the OwnCloud route I thought I would take a step back and ask the more general question to the IT pros around here:

If you're hosting your own cloud server at home, do you have any advice for what to use?

My requirements for the moment are as follows:

• User management (see above for the example)
• Free. I'll probably be looking to have a max of 10 users, and going for the services like Google Workspace or OneDrive are not within the budget (£10 per user per month). Plus, since it would be my cloud I would be using it for personal use so I would like to separate home items from work (hence another reason for needing user management)
• Cross-platform access. The laptop (cloud server) would run Ubuntu 24.04 Desktop (or Server edition and I'll throw a GUI in for good measure down the line, or use a different Distro if you guys suggest it) , everyone else should be able to access the server via Linux, Windows, MacOS, and at a push Android and iOS

I think that's everything. But any suggestions about what I've missed, any advice on how to do this, it would all be much appreciated.

[binaryzero]

If you're going to punch a hole in your firewall to expose something to the wider internet, it's recommended the service sits on a dedicated VLAN (DMZ) to minimise the risk of exposing other internal services.

 

 

[Asharae]

I used to run a Nextcloud instance on my own Unraid server at home using reverse proxies and things to keep things accessible and more secure than just having ports opened on my router.

In the end, I got rid of it because I just didn't use it as much as I thought I was going to, and my internet speed at the time was (and is still not) the greatest, so performance wasn't that great anyway.

But if you have the compute, storage and decent networking, it ticks all the boxes and offers quite a bit of functionality.

 

[+InsaneNutter MVC]

I self hosted Nextcloud for a while so my Mum could pool together some photos / videos with my aunts / uncles and organise them all.

From what I remember I had it setup so my Mum had full control over the photos and was the only one who could manage / delete them. My aunts & uncles could view all the photos, however could only upload new photos to a certain folder for my Mum to then organise.

Nextcloud did the job, however I did feel it was pretty resource intensive and quite bloated if all you really wanted was a self hosted Dropbox like service to share files. Theirs a task that runs in the background to generate previews of all the images you upload, I found it performed better once this had finished running.

I had Nextcloud sat behind Cloudflare's Web Application Firewall for some additional security, only Cloudflare's IP range could access my Nextcloud install directly, to ensure all traffic went through Cloudflare first.

Running the Nextcloud Docker image will make it easier for you to update to newer versions in the future: https://github.com/nextcloud/all-in-one