nextcloud vs owncloud

TimboJones

@AlwaysSkint said:
@TimboJones @Daniel15
Nextcloud offers a convenient GUI,

Wuh, wuh, what? I hate their GUI and can't use it more than two minutes without asking why they did something a certain way. A lot of unhelpful error messages when there's conflicts.

[Edit: Borg Backup Manager doesn't seem to be available, yet]

I think it's vaporware. I believe it stalled two years ago. Too bad.

Daniel15

@AlwaysSkint said: decommissioned disc is resold

Do you securely store the encryption key? Server-side encryption is significantly less useful if the key is on the same disk as the encrypted data

@AlwaysSkint said: Nextcloud offers a convenient GUI, when it comes to organising longer term backups

I definitely agree that Borgbackup lacks a good UI, but I just use it via the command-line. You can get a list of all backups ("archives") for a particular repository, get a list of all files in a given archive, and restore individual files. That's all I've needed. I've done some DR (disaster recovery) runs and it works pretty well.

The thing with Borgbackup's design is that it's intentionally built to not trust the server-side. Everything is encrypted client-side (the server never sees the encryption key to decrypt the data), and by default it'll throw loud warnings if the server-side state doesn't match the expected state based on the local cache, to catch if someone tried tampering with the server-side. This means that even doing backups to some third-party backup service should be fairly secure.

@AlwaysSkint said: Given that it rides on nginx, I (perhaps naively) expected it to be much snappier than a pared down Nextcloud but that doesn't appear to be the case, in my initial impressions.

The Seafile web UI isn't much faster than Nextcloud (Python is generally faster than PHP, but not by much), but the actual syncing is far faster and more reliable.

Not sure if Nextcloud added it, but Seafile supports delta syncing - If you only change a small part of a large file, Seafile only needs to sync the changed parts, whereas Nextcloud would resync the entire file. Not sure if that's changed recently, as I know it was one of their roadmap items.

chocolateshirt

@Daniel15 said:
Not sure if Nextcloud added it, but Seafile supports delta syncing - If you only change a small part of a large file, Seafile only needs to sync the changed parts, whereas Nextcloud would resync the entire file. Not sure if that's changed recently, as I know it was one of their roadmap items.

No, NextCloud did not support deltasync, it upload the whole file..

yoursunny

@Daniel15 said:

@AlwaysSkint said: Given that it rides on nginx, I (perhaps naively) expected it to be much snappier than a pared down Nextcloud but that doesn't appear to be the case, in my initial impressions.

The Seafile web UI isn't much faster than Nextcloud (Python is generally faster than PHP, but not by much), but the actual syncing is far faster and more reliable.

This rabbit hole …
I spent the day deploying Seafile, moving half of Nextcloud into Seafile, and installing mobile apps.

Synchronization is indeed faster.
Photo thumbnails show up rapidly in mobile app.

However, GUI is ugly.
Seafile and its dependencies consume more RAM in steady/idle state (350MB in 3 containers) than Nextcloud (80MB in 1 container).

My main installation is on NVMe.
I bought HDD big plate chicken yesterday, so I also made automated encrypted backups via Rclone.
I'll need to test the backups before continuing the migration.

Daniel15

@yoursunny said: Seafile and its dependencies consume more RAM in steady/idle state (350MB in 3 containers) than Nextcloud (80MB in 1 container).

Are the two extra containers MySQL and Memcache? I don't think it's really fair to count their memory usage as part of Seafile's memory usage, as one MySQL or Memcache server can be shared between multiple apps, and I don't think it's common to run multiple MySQL daemons on a single server. If you want to avoid MySQL, you can use Seafile with SQLite instead (just know that SQLite DBs can't be placed on an NFS share and will be slower with multiple concurrent writes as the writes can't happen concurrently).

I'm not sure how much RAM mine is using, but I can check it when I'm home. I already had MySQL and Memcache running for other projects, so I reused those instances for seafile.

@yoursunny said: However, GUI is ugly.

I like the UI. It's fairly clean and intuitive. There's beauty in simple UIs and often they're a lot harder to design than complex ones (as you need to think a lot about the UI elements and what's most important to show, rather than just throwing everything on the page)

yoursunny

@Daniel15 said:

@yoursunny said: Seafile and its dependencies consume more RAM in steady/idle state (350MB in 3 containers) than Nextcloud (80MB in 1 container).

Are the two extra containers MySQL and Memcache? I don't think it's really fair to count their memory usage as part of Seafile's memory usage, as one MySQL or Memcache server can be shared between multiple apps, and I don't think it's common to run multiple MySQL daemons on a single server. If you want to avoid MySQL, you can use Seafile with SQLite instead (just know that SQLite DBs can't be placed on an NFS share and will be slower with multiple concurrent writes as the writes can't happen concurrently).

I'm not sure how much RAM mine is using, but I can check it when I'm home. I already had MySQL and Memcache running for other projects, so I reused those instances for seafile.

I didn't have MySQL and Memcached on the machine.
I started with the official compose.yaml, only inserted CPU and memory restrictions.
Memory usage is like this: (after several hours of usage)

CONTAINER ID   NAME                CPU %     MEM USAGE / LIMIT   MEM %     NET I/O          BLOCK I/O         PIDS
5301f02774ef   seafile-mysql       0.02%     75.66MiB / 128MiB   59.11%    113kB / 119kB    290MB / 6.39MB    18
15d39dfb6b15   seafile             0.09%     286MiB / 512MiB     55.87%    3.1GB / 616MB    44.2GB / 2.08MB   39
bc60fd36c2ce   seafile-memcached   0.06%     1.727MiB / 48MiB    3.60%     5MB / 4.36MB     3.74GB / 0B       10
9db6814e9a30   nextcloud           0.01%     79.36MiB / 512MiB   15.50%    3.75MB / 339MB   39.6GB / 138MB    9

I see gronis/seafile container image that is smaller in size.
Maybe I'd try this one next.

@yoursunny said: However, GUI is ugly.

I like the UI. It's fairly clean and intuitive. There's beauty in simple UIs and often they're a lot harder to design than complex ones (as you need to think a lot about the UI elements and what's most important to show, rather than just throwing everything on the page)

@yoursunny said:
My main installation is on NVMe.
I bought HDD big plate chicken yesterday, so I also made automated encrypted backups via Rclone.
I'll need to test the backups before continuing the migration.

Backup test completed.
Seafile Admin Manual - Recovery has one different step for Docker setup:

1. When I bring up the containers for the first time, a seafile user is automatically created in MySQL with a random password, and the password is written into /shared/seafile/conf.
2. When I restore the /shared volume, the password is overwritten and does not match what's in MySQL.
3. I need to either change the password in MySQL, or copy out the current password before restoring the folder and write it back after restoring.

After correcting this issue, I got a working system on another machine.

yoursunny

I switched to gronis/seafile and bitnami/mariadb Docker images.
Following this guide, I configured performance_schema = off in MariaDB.
Now the memory usage is like this:

CONTAINER ID   NAME           CPU %     MEM USAGE / LIMIT   MEM %     NET I/O           BLOCK I/O        PIDS
040a25c40eb2   seafile        0.02%     278.4MiB / 512MiB   54.37%    141MB / 407MB     530MB / 1.64MB   31
443b4b887b62   seafile-db     0.02%     23.53MiB / 128MiB   18.38%    3.86MB / 6.55MB   122MB / 6.06MB   16
9db6814e9a30   nextcloud      0.01%     84.91MiB / 512MiB   16.58%    93kB / 132kB      153MB / 717kB    9

Unlike seafileltd/seafile-mc, the gronis/seafile image doesn't contain nginx reverse proxy instead.
Instead, I can use Caddy to reverse proxy to Seahub and Seafile-server separately.
This doesn't save much memory, but it should be faster.