I have used Nextcloud for a long time.
In fact, I have used Nextcloud from before it was Nextcloud - before the fork of Owncloud.
And while I have not used many of its features - sync, calendar, and contacts - I’ve been a very happy user for a long time.
Until a year or so ago, at least.
I’ve had a worry, at the back of my mind, for a while, that Nextcloud is trying to do too much. A collaborative document editor. An email client. A voice/video conferencing tool, and so on. I’m sure that, in some contexts, this is amazing, and convenient. For me, as someone who typically prefers a piece of software to do one thing well, it left me a bit uneasy.
But that was not, in itself, enough of a reason for me to switch.
A year or so ago, I had problem after problem keeping files in sync. I routinely got error messages about the database (or files; I don’t quite remember) being locked.
And, for me, that was the mainstay of Nextcloud, and indeed the reason why I started to use it in the first place.
I tried all sorts of things, including setting up redis, and trying other memcache options, even though I am the only regular user. I could not get it to sync reliably.
And I really did try, using the voluminous logs to try to determine what was going wrong. But I failed.
And so I started considering other options. Did I actually need Nextcloud at all?
I’ve moved to Syncthing for syncing, and so far, that has been working fine. It is fast, and appears to be reliable. I should probably write about it at some point.
Using Nextcloud to sync photos from my phone was not too bad, but from Sandra’s iPhone, it did not work well. I have switched to Immich for photo sync / gallery, and I’ve been very happy with it.
For contacts and calendar sync - DAV - I am using Radicale. The main annoyance is that Sandra cannot invite me (or anyone) to appointments using the iOS or macOS calendar. For me, I’ve just given Sandra write access to my calendar, so that she can add events directly, but it is far from ideal. I’ve tried using Radicale’s server-side email functionality, and that is not suitable for my needs, as it sends out far too many email. But, for now, Radicale is tolerable, even if I might try to find another option at some point.
And that just leaves the directories which I share via Nextcloud and mount in my file browser. Stuff that I don’t need on my computer, but still want to access.
For that, I’m going back to samba. It works.
And so, once I’ve finalised this and tested it and given it some time to bed in, I will turn off the Nextcloud server.