For your specific use case of photos, Immich is the front runner and a much better experience. Sadly for the general Dropbox replacement I haven't found anything either.
For your specific use case of photos, Immich is the front runner and a much better experience. Sadly for the general Dropbox replacement I haven't found anything either.
> Sadly for the general Dropbox replacement I haven't found anything either.
I had really good luck with Seafile[0]. It's not a full groupware solution, just primarily a really good file syncing/Dropbox solution.
Upsides are everything worked reliably for me, it was much faster, does chunk-level deduplication and some other things, has native apps for everything, is supported by rclone, has a fuse mount option, supports mounting as a "virtual drive" on Windows, supports publicly sharing files, shared "drives", end-to-end encryption, and practically everything else I'd want out of "file syncing solution".
The only thing I didn't like about it is that it stores all of your data as, essentially, opaque chunks on disk that are pieced together using the data in the database. This is how it achieves the performance, deduplication, and other things I _liked_. However it made me a little nervous that I would have a tough time extracting my data if anything went horribly wrong. I took backups. Nothing ever went horribly wrong over 4 or 5 years of running it. I only stopped because I shelved a lot of my self-hosting for a bit.
[0]: https://www.seafile.com/en/home/
Yeah, went with that as well. It’s blazingly fast compared to NC.
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You are mistaken.
I can confirm this. We have been using it for 10 years now in our research lab. No data loss so far. Performance is great. Integration with OnlyOffice works quite well (there were sync problems a few years ago - I think upgrading OnlyOffice solved this issue).
thanks for sharing. been looking for something like this for awhile
For a general file sharing / storage solution there is also OpenCloud: https://opencloud.eu/de
It's what I want to try next. Written in go, it looks promising.
Too many Cloud things! OwnCloud, NextCloud, OpenCloud. There have* to be better names available...
Suggest one.
Look into syncthing for a dropbox replacement, have been using it for years, very satisfied.
Syncthing is under my "want to like" list but I gave up on it. I'm a one person show who just wants to sync a few dozen markdown files across a few laptops and a phone. Every time I'd run it I'd invariably end up with conflict files. It got to the point where I was spending more time merging diffs than writing. How it could do that with just one person running it I have no idea.
That should not happen. I use it a lot and never had this issue, there maybe is something wrong about your setup.
A good idea is to have it on an always-on server and add your share as an encrypted one (like you set the password on all your apps but not on the server); this pretty much results in a dropbox-like experience since you have a central place to sync even when your other devices are not online
My Syncthing experience matches Oxodao's. Over years with >10k files / 100 gb, I've only ever had conflicts when I actually made conflicting simultaneous changes.
I use it on my phone (configured to only sync on WiFi), laptop (connected 99% of the time), and server (up 100% of the time).
The always-up server/laptop as a "master node" are probably key.
That is good advice from both of you. I knew it has to be me because it's honestly one of the most successful and popular open source tools I've worked with. I think I should've made that more clear in my original comment.
The conflicts come of course when you edit a file on 2 devices before Syncthing had a chance to sync them. I mostly solved this by running Snycthing on a server as well as on clients, so that at least the server is always online, as a point of synchronization. So now I only get conflict files, if somehow my phone doesn't have Internet and I edit files on my phone, which happens very rarely.
I had this when I had a windows system in the mix. Windows handles case differently in filenames than linux and macOS, and it caused conflicts.
Same. I don't know why so many people like syncthing.
I don't think that there is some good alternative to open source syncthing ,the way syncthing just does syncing no
Let me know if you know of any alternative which have helped you but I haven't tried syncthing but I have heard good things about it overall so I feel like I like it already even if I haven't tried it I guess.
If you just need a Dropbox replacement for file syncing, Nextcloud is fine if you use the native file system integrations and ignore the web and WebDAV interfaces.
I'd say Ente-photo is at least as good if not better than Immich.
https://github.com/ente-io/ente
I would say the opposite. Ente has one huge advantage and that it is e2ee so it's a must if you are hosting someone else photos. But if you are planning to run something on your server/NAS for yourself then Immich has many advantages (that often relate to the e2ee). For example... your files are still files on the disk so less worry about something unrecoverably breaking. And you can add external locations. With Ente it is just about backing up your phone photos. Immich works pretty well as camera photo organizer.
The Ente desktop app has a continuous export function that’ll just dump everything into plain file directories.
It makes a little more sense when you’re using their cloud version, because otherwise you’re storing the data twice.
Does it have a mobile app that backs up the photos while in the background and can essentially be "forgotten"? That's pretty much what I need for my family: their photos need to get to my server magically.
Both Ente and Immich have that.
I'm also a very happy Ente user. I use Garage for its S3-like storage, with one of the nodes running on my local network (LAN). My local DNS (CoreDNS) is also configured to use this local node for the domain, which makes everything very fast.
I'm a very happy Ente Photos user as well.
There is also "memories for nextcloud" which basically matches immich in feature set (was ahead until last month), nextcloud+memories make a very strong replacement for gdrive or dropbox
Yeah I guess my issue is that if I can't trust the mobile app not to lose my photos (or stop syncing, or not sync everything), then I just can't use it at all. There is no point in having Nextcloud AND iCloud just because I don't trust Nextcloud :D.
Nextcloud mobile app is crap but fortunately it’s just WebDAV so you can use any other WebDAV app for synchronization.
That's a good point! Are there good WebDAV apps synchronising, say the Photo gallery on iOS, transparently and always in the background?
Unfortunately Apple puts extremely strict restrictions on background tasks so you will never have something as seamless as native iCloud or the amazing Android FolderSync app that I used for realtime synchronization for several years without a single issue.
I know people work around these iOS limitations by setting up springboard widgets that piggyback on background refresh tasks to do uploads. People also create Automator actions (e.g. run every day at time or location based) in the Shortcuts app.
I haven’t tried it but a popular option on iOS seems to be: https://apps.apple.com/app/photosync-transfer-photos/id41585...
I replaced all my Dropbox uses with SyncThing (and love it). I run an instance on my server at all times and on every client.
+1 for SyncThing
I have it installed on my immediate family's devices to ensure all the photos are auto-backed-up to our NAS (which is then backed up to another NAS).
I need to check to make sure it's still working once in a while (every couple of months), but it's usually fine, and even if it's somehow stopped working, getting it running again catches itself up to where it should have been anyway.
Have you looked into https://filebrowser.org/? While it's not drop-in replacement for Google Drive/Dropbox, it has been serving me well for similar quick usecase.
Does its iOS/Android app automatically backup the photos in the background? When I looked into Immich (didn't try it) it sounded like it was more of a server thing. I need the automation so that my family can forget about it.
I use Syncthing as a Dropbox replacement, and I like it. I have a machine at home running it that is accessible over the net. Not the prettiest, but it works!
I love immich, too, but I have also ran into a lot of issues with syncing large libraries. The iPhone app will just hang sometimes.
Since the last major update to 2.0, it has gotten immensely better. Whereas before the app was hung for 30 seconds on startup and would only reliably sync in the foreground for my partner, it now just works. Can open, syncs in the background. Never had such issues on my phone, probably the size of your collection matters here.
Does it recover though, or do you end up in situations where your setup is essentially broken?
Like if I backup photos from iOS, then remove a subset of those from iOS to make space on the phone (but obviously I want to keep them on the cloud), and later the mobile app gets out of sync, I don't want to end up in a situation where some photos are on iOS, some on the cloud, but none of the devices has everything, and I have no easy way to resync them.
It won't recover unless I do something... sometimes just quitting the iPhone app and then toggling enabling backups works, but not always. I had to completely delete and reinstall the app once to get it to work, and had to resync all 45000 images/videos I had.
I have had the server itself fail in strange ways where I had to restart it. I had to do a full fresh install once when it got hopelessly confused and I was getting database errors saying records either existed when they shouldn't or didn't exist when they should.
I think I am a pretty skilled sysadmin for these types of things, having both designed and administered very large distributed systems for two decades now, but maybe I am doing things wrong, but I think there are just some gotchas still with the project.
Right, that's the kind of issues I am concerned about.
iCloud / Google Photos just don't have that, they really never lose a photo. It's very difficult for me to convince my family to move to something that may lose their data, when iCloud / Google Photos works and is really not that expensive.
It has gotten more stable as I have used it for a while. I think if you want to do it, just wait until it is stable and you have a good backup routine before relying on it.
I have found adding the following four lines to the immich proxy host in nginx proxy manager (advanced tab) solved my immich syncing issues:
client_max_body_size 50000M;
proxy_read_timeout 600s;
proxy_send_timeout 600s;
send_timeout 600s;
FWIW, my library is about 22000 items large. Hope this helps someone.
I too have found Syncthing + Filebrowser to be a sufficient substitute for Dropbox.
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