I set up a little Ubuntu Core server with Nextcloud for archives and sharing, and Syncthing for slightly cleverer sync of files I'm actively working with. Syncthing is decentralized, and it's designed so you can just pick any folder and sync it between your devices, which makes for a really handy workflow. But I like good having a long-running server in the middle that I can treat as canonical. That way I have one place for backups, my devices can sync with the server over the Internet when they don't have each other, and I can access Syncthing files via Nextcloud.

I was expecting to still be using Dropbox for a while after that, but it's been surprisingly low maintenance after the initial setup, and it has replaced it perfectly for me :) Highly recommended for anyone bothered by this change.

This echoes my experience exactly. I use Syncthing for all the documents I don't need a web UI for or that I don't need accessible on mobile (only between computers), such as my ebooks, PDFs, things like that, and Nextcloud for everything else.

"If they would do something I don't like, I would just never upgrade anymore and be done with it." -- That sounds like a good strategy but in my experience, it never works because your technology environment is not a vacuum (I assume). At some point you'll need an upgrade for security, compatibility, etc.

It can run in a container, a virtual machine, hosted on a cloud instance or whatever. Nowadays, you have infinite choices for isolation. One of my colleague runs it in a DigitalOcean droplet and nothing else.

A quiet media server at home and VPN is what does it for me. That solution is not for everyone but someone could start making pre-built images or media servers with nextcloud. I believe FreeNAS and the like already have nextcloud as an app option.

If you want to run your file sync client in a container, I think that limitation alone removes a huge amount of value from a low-friction file sync tool.

Why would you run the client in a container? I was talking about the server.

Because the client can be just as vulnerable to security issues as the server is.

Isolating for security is a totally different topic. We talked about pinning the application to a specific version, and I suggested that it can be done with various tools, isolating from a bigger operating system where packages would automatically updated and Nextcloud would break after a while. It has nothing to do with security.

Of course you can do security for isolation on top of it any time, and sure, you won't get security updates after a while which would be nice, but there are tools to secure an outdated app in other ways either.

> but there are tools to secure an outdated app in other ways either.

Not really.

I switched to nextcloud a while ago. When Dropbox started sending me email after email telling me they were going to delete my account soon, I couldn't wait for it to happen. (OK, I could wait since I wasn't willing to spend time to log in and do it myself).

It is nice to know where my data is.

An easier option at the moment is probably SyncThing which just syncs directly between your devices. I use it for sending my KeePass DB and photos from my phone to my NAS.

If you're willing to invest setup effort it might also be worth considering Tahoe-LAFS's "GridSync" which seems to be making some progress as of late.

nextcloud is fine, but I have a multi-function printer with scan-to-cloud support (very insecure, but VERY useful and super easy) that support only dropbox, box, microsoft amd google. I'll try rclone :-)