What to choose: Syncthing vs nextCloud vs Seafile vs OwnCloud vs Other service?

Question

Data synchronization

Hello! Orange Pi PC is available ( Characteristics ), usb hard drives, dynamic ip and a great desire to raise an analogue of dropbox on it. Also Cups, transmission, samba are spinning there.
You need the ability to synchronize photos from mobile devices (ios, android, windows 7/10) outside the local network, preferably with automatic backup to other computers, as well as the ability to receive files from other computers on the network (for example, when traveling). User-friendly clients, since the server is raised to the whole family.
I can not decide what is better to try to raise, I ask for advice.
Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

mike153 : tried all options. Nextcloud is a fork of Owncloud. In fact, the same thing, although NC is considered more advanced and in general the entire open source party has gone there. That is why I am writing about him. Everything is solely on the rights of IMHO. Pros:
- The most important thing is to work with files in the file version. That is, if we assume that "everything has fallen", you can connect the disk from the failed server to any Linux and pull out the information from /var/www or wherever it will be stored there. You can also connect external storage, that is, suppose you have a folder with movies and music on your server - you can simply connect them to NC.
- CardDAV, CalDAV out of the box.
Minuses:
- Brakes always, randomly, at any time. Regardless of whether Apache or Nginx, MySQL or MariaDB, slows down on any software.
- Interface - UG, SHN
Now about Seafile. Pros:
- Turbojet is simple. Works very fast.
- The interface is very nice.
- Advanced versioning.
- Can open docx, odt, xlsx, etc. without additional software. But no editing. If you need editing, you need a separate Document Server from Collabora or Onlyoffice.
- The PRO version is free for 3 users, but it doesn't make much sense, because. enterprise-chips are 1. full-text document search using elasticsearch, which is simply monstrous resource consumption 2. two-factor authorization 3. and something else, not really needed at home
- There are clients for all major platforms
- You can install both manually according to the manual on the site, and using the installation script, which will do everything by itself.
Minuses:
- The files are stored in their own format, what is it called correctly? - at the level of blocks, or something. Access to information is only through the web interface, WebDAV, and applications for synchronization. That is, all the information in the Seafile on the disk is just a bunch of folders and files that cannot be taken and used so easily - you also need a database dump. That is, in case of problems with the system, it will be difficult to get information. But there is a way out - seaf-cli is a GUIless client for synchronization. The point is that on the server on which Seafile is running, you can additionally install seaf-cli, set it on a directory, and it will add a synchronized copy of the information of the main Seafile database to this very directory, moreover, in the form of normal files that can be shared as anything, backup, etc. The downside of the seaf-cli solution is that
- Well, as a consequence of such an organization of files - the inability to connect external storage, in contrast to the warm lamp Nextcloud.
In general, I personally settled on Seafile.

Answer 2

My choice was NextCloud (but I'll just say "corporate" user).
Pros.
1. As rightly noted, it stores files as files. Those. backups and synchronization normally work with third-party tools.
2. Develops constantly. New addons, versions, etc.
3. Changing the interface "out of the box". Any wallpapers, logos, etc.
4. On my bundle Core2Duo E4500, 8Gb, 250SSD, 8TB Raid1 (storage). Ubuntu 16.04, Apache2, MariaDB - flies.
It slows down at the first login and changing the settings for viewing files. 50+ users (active).
5. As a corp user, LDAP is pleasant to me (the setting is true through the op).
Minuses.
Yyyy. So far I don’t see such big ones to write about them.

Answer 3

The other day I tried ownCloud, NextCloud and Seafile.
The server part is written in PHP + DB (it definitely knows how to work with mysql and sqlite).
For the frontend, you must have Apache2+php or nginx+php.
Without setting up redis to help - the brake is simply impossible. Things get much better with redis. All scanning and verification operations go through cron, which by default runs every 15 minutes (by the way, when installing the server part, they do not warn that this needs to be done).
All clients work through WebDAV, this is just a super-minus :
Since during synchronization, the client scans all server folders in turn, sending a bunch of requests. When uploading each file, it is also sent as a separate request with all the overhead costs - as a result, a bunch of small files are synchronized for an unbearably long time (10GB of small files can be sent to a server with a 1Gbit link for 10-20 hours). All this, in the event of a crash, just stops.
And it can crash for various reasons (I will list what we had):
After each crash, the synchronizer simply stops. After some time, it restarts, again comes to an error and stops again. Of course, I understand that if each user needs to allocate 1-5 GB of space, then everything is probably OK, but when designers need to synchronize 200 GB of layouts and programmers need 5-20 GB of small files, then this solution can be safely bypassed.
The only advantage of owncloud/nextcloud is that it stores files in files.
It is interesting that despite the fact that the whole open source party seems to have gone to nextcloud, owncloud now has both a virtual file system and diff synchronization, which is still not in nextcloud.
The developers say that the server core is written in C and is very fast. The rest seems to be written in python. It uses MySQL or sqlite as a database.
For the frontend, you can use apache2 or nginx. And you can connect via IP.
First day of testing. So far, everything is so good that you can’t even believe it. I synchronized 10GB of small files without any questions or errors in less than 1 hour.
Files are stored in some kind of own structure, this is a minus, but there is a seaf-fsck utility , which, in case of trouble, can export all files. It will not work to do this only with encrypted libraries. But no one bothers to set up a backup of the database and data to a separate storage, or at least store everything on ride arrays in order to protect yourself.
Let's stop on Seafile for now. The speed and buggy of Nextcloud/owncloud will negate all its advantages.

Answer 4

Can the seafile client (mobile or desktop) work with multiple servers at the same time? Is there some kind of switcher between accounts (different servers)?