Hi everyone,
I’m seriously thinking about moving from Nextcloud AIO to OwnCloud Infinite Scale (OCIS), and I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Here’s why I’m considering the switch:
- I need software that’s stable and doesn’t break after every update.
- Minimal maintenance is a priority for me.
- A solution that works out of the box with minimal setup complexity.
- Support for Docker Compose deployment.
- Support for S3 storage as the primary storage backend.
What I like about OCIS:
- It’s written in Go (which I prefer over PHP).
- It doesn’t require a database, simplifying setup and maintenance. (Not sure about it)
However, I’m still hesitant due to:
- The limited documentation for OCIS.
- Concerns about whether it’s as open-source friendly as Nextcloud.
While I’ve been using Nextcloud Talk, I find it slow and unstable, so I’m planning to transition to XMPP. That said, Nextcloud itself has been challenging to maintain, and I’m looking for something faster and more reliable.
For those who have experience with OCIS, would you recommend switching, or should I stick with Nextcloud despite its issues?
Thanks in advance for your input!
The only thing the AIO is missing is #5, and you can probably mount an S3 bucket on the docker host and set the environment variable in the docker-compose.yml accordingly.
I’ve used NC for a long time now in virtually every configuration available from bare metal to snap to NCP, the AIO is by far the easiest thing I’ve ever used to set up and maintain Nextcloud. I wouldn’t be climbing into bed with a proprietary oriented company instead. They will eventually fuck over the users, count on it.
I’m actually using S3 as Primary Storage Backend. As a result I’ll have to manually backup the database and config files.
Nextcloud Docker compose https://hub.docker.com/_/nextcloud/
I don’t do much maintenance on my nextcloud image either. I spend a lot of time setting it up on bare metal because I didn’t know docker compose existed but it’s very popular nowadays. With docker compose you don’t have to setup a lot either. It didn’t break for me once in the past years.
What’s wrong with nextcloud’s S3 object storage?
I used NextCloud in a Docker container but found that unless I was really on top of checking versions for updates, it was very easy to get behind and then unless one way VERY careful about going up in the correct increments, it was quite easy to end up with a version mismatch between the files and DB structure.
As much as I hate SNAP (mainly due to them being overused on Ubuntu desktop and bloaty blobs full of weird permission issues) I’ve got to say that moving to a SNAP version of NextCloud on my server has made my life so much easier. A scheduled job runs a “snap refresh” regularly and it’s been fairly stable for over a year now, except for one small incident where it broke the reference to the internal office suite install and for some reason stated trying to go with a localhost version
Podman has a built-in automatic update feature that monitors the source repo. Could be useful for you.
I use Nextcloud AIO. If you use s3 as primary storage, the backup (using Borgbackup) won’t work.
Just to throw my own experience in the mix. I tried the AIO and standard versions of Nextcloud and found them to be flakey and slow. But I felt compelled to keep trying. That’s when I found NextcloudPi. I’ve installed it on a Pi4 running from an external SSD and it’s been rock solid. I believe that version is no longer in development though and I primarily use it as a sync platform for various apps rather than using the web apps directly.
And just to be contrary, have you looked at Seafile? It’s stupid fast and stable but some features are hidden behind a paywall if you have more than 3 users (community vs pro). Their documentation is poor, and the data is stored in Git-lik chunks on the server. All of which can be a deal breaker for some. The external storage feature works, but for a newb like me, it was a bear to get running.
OCIS is bad for third party integration. OCIS force the use of OIDC with no workaround since the launch of OCIS few years ago.
For example, owncloud claims that it can integrate with rclone. Owncloud suggest the use of OIDC-agent which is very complicated. It also suggest enable the use of Basic Authentication which is bad for security.
Thank you so much for the information. Third party integration is very important in the long run.
Personally I prefer oidc as it plays a central role in my setup, but have you seen other integration issues not related to oidc?
No idea at all, but I am highly interested in your experience. So it would be great if you could came here back to share it with us
Will do. Still reading docs and blog posts. ❤
Don’t forget us!
For what it’s worth, I do think OCIS is worthy of switching to if you don’t make use of all of the various apps Nextcloud can do. OCIS can hook into an online office provider, but doesn’t do much more than just the cloud storage as of right now.
That said, the cloud storage and UX performance is night and day between Nextcloud/Owncloud and OCIS. If you’re using a S3 provider as a storage backend, then you only need to ensure backups for the S3 objects and the small metadata volume the OCIS container needs in order to ensure file integrity.
Another thing to note about OCIS: it provides no at-rest encryption module unlike Nextcloud. If that’s important to your use case, either stick with Nextcloud or you will need to figure out how to roll your own.
I know that OCIS does intend to bring more features into the stack eventually (CalDAV, CardDAV, etc.). As it stands currently though, OCIS isn’t a behemoth that Nextcloud/Owncloud are, and the architecture, maintenance is more straightforward overall.
As for open-source: OCIS released and has still remained under Apache 2.0 for its entire lifespan thus far. If you don’t trust Owncloud over the drama that created Nextcloud, then I guess remain wary? Otherwise OCIS looks fine to use.
I think I should use it for some time along with Nextcloud AIO. The official documentation is very confusing.
I started and ended up bailing. The deciding factor for me was the way data is stored with OCIS (basically hashes), so backup/restore would be a much larger pain. So I’m sticking with Nextcloud as much as I hate PHP and dislike the performance issues.
I thought backup/restore would be easier with OCIS 🤔
Here’s how I think about it. If my NAS goes down and I need a specific file from backup, how would I get that? With OCIS, everything is stored with a hash, whereas with Nextcloud it’s stored by filename. So to me, Nextcloud seems easier to deal with.
Assuming you just want file sync and storage, if you can live without External Storage (having another SFTP/WebDAV/whatever backend), then I think oCIS is great for you. It also expect an OIDC auth provider by default - this guide helped me through. Note that you have to configure the S3 storage driver in oCIS and properly backup your buckets and metadata.
For Talk you can setup an internal Matrix and TURN server too. I recommend conduwuit if you want something lightweight, or Synapse (quite heavy) if you need OIDC integration.
Not sure what you mean by expects oauth.
I’ve been testing it and it works very well so far in my tests with just a normal user name and password to login.
I’ve actually been meaning to work on getting oauth connected to my authentik but haven’t gotten around to it yet
So far the server seems very solid and the clients for android and windows also seem very good.
My bad, I meant the recommended deployment is to bring your own auth provider, but normal username/password is fine too. Glad it works!
I am considering switching as well, for similar reasons. What has been holding me back (besides missing time to plan and do the migration) is thst I don’t quite trust ownCloud any more, and due to a lack of documentation, I would want to run it in parallel for some time to get the hang of it before migrating the other users (which adds to the time constraint).
I’ll most likely deploy using their helm chart – does anyone have any real-world experience with it?
If I wasn’t using so many other Nextcloud apps besides the file storage I would switch.
I had good and bad times with both. I am finally happy with “pydio cells”
What issues did you face with OCIS?
First, nothing. But I run just my private containers and update them automatically with watchtower. I like it when I could don’t care about things. OCIS was one of the freaky ones. Breaking changes are literally breaking everything. I lose the data and start over two or three times. (The data wasn’t completely lost, I had backups and/or was able to use an older version instead.)
The issue you faced is clearly a scary one!
