One of the apps I have run for years has been Nextcloud, and I’ve been a huge fan of it all that time – I posted about my setup of Nextcloud here. However, over the years, I have found a few issues with it:
- I don’t use nearly 10% of its capabilities
- When hosted on my own infrastructure, it does run a bit sluggish (due to it having a LOT of things installed which I don’t really need)
- When hosted in AWS it runs brilliantly, but is costing me about £20 a month
So, I started looking for some more light-weight alternatives and came across Owncloud, which as far as I can tell is pretty much an exact copy of Nextcloud in terms of its file storage/sharing capability, but with none of the other extra tools that make Nextcloud what it is.
I decided to give it a go, and have to say, it has become my go-to utility for on-prem cloud hosted file storage – its quick, and does the job I need it to – store files for me to access wherever I am, on whatever device I’m using.
As such, once I have migrated all the files from Nextcloud into Owncloud, I’ll be closing down my Nextcloud server from AWS and from the server I run my containers on.
The image I used for Owncloud was from here – https://hub.docker.com/_/owncloud, and I followed the docker installation guide from here – https://doc.owncloud.com/server/next/admin_manual/installation/docker/
I used the sample compose.yml file provided below and made the requisite edits for my environment (usewrnames, passwords, etc.)
This file refers to a number of variables which are held in an .env file – again, I used the supplied example file and edited accordingly
Once the files are created, the container can be deployed and then the service accessed via the browser.
As I mentioned, the interface is almost identical to Nextcloud, so there was no learning curve to how to use the app – Creating folders, uploading files, creating shares, etc. is exactly the same as with Nextcloud, so it’s a win in my books!