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by anderspitman·9y ago·view on hn ↗
I'm still waiting for an open source self-hosted alternative to Google Drive. Even just the basic functionality of a file browser, image thumbnails, photo gallery, and video player would be fantastic. Many such projects exist, and maybe I'm just lazy, but I really don't want to have to set up a PHP server in order to run such a thing. I would love something like Syncthing where you download a compiled Go binary, start up the service, and configure it through your browser.

I started implementing something like this myself but didn't make it very far. The fear of eventually running out of space or having privacy/security issues on Drive hasn't produced enough pain for me to really do anything yet.

6 comments
NextCloud has your back on this. Alternatively, google for the awesome-selfhosted list.
I highly recommend Seafile for this purpose. It was far more performant and reliable than ownCloud when I tried it, and more self-contained.
100% agree. Running Seafile for ~1.5 years with >100GB synced and ~5 users. Couldn't be happier. The sync-part just works.

Big advantages over own/nextcloud:

* Easy updates that work. When I tried owncloud, nearly every update I had to fiddle around with the database to make it work. Didn't have a single problem when updating Seafile so far.

* Block-level sync. Meaning if you change one line in a 10MB file, it will only update that part. Last time I checked, owncloud did not support this.

* Sync just works. When I tried owncloud, folders disappeared, folders were duplicated. Never had this problem with Seafile.

I installed Seafile and ran it for a while, but what I didn't like is that in order to get to the file on the server, I had to use fuse and, well, I just didn't want to have to do that. Picky, I get it, but we all have preferences.

I've run ownCloud for some time now and I don't see the reliability issues that some people claim. I am running it on TS140 and not something small like a RPi, so maybe that makes the difference.

I've run ownCloud for about half a year to sync my dev files to a hosted server. For a while, everything was great. What happened for me at least was if I was saving a project while ownCloud was syncing, there was a chance of it messing up and then requiring a full resync of my dev folder (a not insignificant amount of data).

The first time it happened I shrugged it off as a fluke. The second time I became gunshy and would disable it any time I was working, then enable it after. Not a big inconvenience but a hassle and something I had to remember. After a while I stopped using it. YMMV, of course.

I recall Digital Ocean lets you whip up a 1-click VM instance with OwnCloud all setup and ready to go.

As an alternative, you can just:

# curl -O http://vestacp.com/vst-install.sh # bash vst-install.sh

which would setup the entire LEMP stack for you (along with a full-featured, minimalist hosting admin panel) and then you can install any of the available file sharing tools.

Except it doesn't work...

  # bash vst-install.sh
  vst-install.sh: line 1: syntax error near unexpected token `newline'
  vst-install.sh: line 1: `<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" 
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">'
Try this:

# curl -O http://vestacp.com/pub/vst-install.sh

# bash vst-install.sh

That's because link is dead.
The URL for vst-install.sh should be: https://vestacp.com/pub/vst-install.sh
My bad - I was typing from memory (that I thought was accurate ;-)). Thanks for catching/correcting.
Been looking at cloning the project to make the installer less dependent on vestacp.com's assets, so I only happened to know :)
Why do you want that in a browser? what's wrong with the native graphical shells?
You have to install them, and they have to exist for every platform where you want to use them.

For cloud services, the only unambiguous win for native over web client is access to platform APIs that the browser may not use.

Someone has to install them, not always you.

Someone has to install these web shells too, often not you.

If your gripe is with the setup, take a look into cloudron.io
OwnCloud?
original project forked to become NextCloud (but haven't looked myself at the status of each, just assuming NextCloud is the way to go now)
From what I can see (used to use ownCloud, switched to Nextcloud), this is the general overview:

* ownCloud is more stability-focused, used by large corporations, slower release schedule.

* Nextcloud is like more experimental, with new updates every two weeks, adding new features constantly, two major versions in front of ownCloud.

So, I tend to think them as ownCloud being kind of like Ubuntu LTS release, and Nextcloud being a regular six-month release.

They also cooperate a lot and build on top of each other (for example, Nextcloud just makes a skin on top of ownCloud's desktop client).

Also, Nextcloud's app community seems more vibrant than ownCloud's.