Hi everyone,
I’m seriously thinking about moving from Nextcloud AIO to OwnCloud Infinite Scale (OCIS), and I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Here’s why I’m considering the switch:
- I need software that’s stable and doesn’t break after every update.
- Minimal maintenance is a priority for me.
- A solution that works out of the box with minimal setup complexity.
- Support for Docker Compose deployment.
- Support for S3 storage as the primary storage backend.
What I like about OCIS:
- It’s written in Go (which I prefer over PHP).
- It doesn’t require a database, simplifying setup and maintenance. (Not sure about it)
However, I’m still hesitant due to:
- The limited documentation for OCIS.
- Concerns about whether it’s as open-source friendly as Nextcloud.
While I’ve been using Nextcloud Talk, I find it slow and unstable, so I’m planning to transition to XMPP. That said, Nextcloud itself has been challenging to maintain, and I’m looking for something faster and more reliable.
For those who have experience with OCIS, would you recommend switching, or should I stick with Nextcloud despite its issues?
Thanks in advance for your input!
OCIS is bad for third party integration. OCIS force the use of OIDC with no workaround since the launch of OCIS few years ago.
For example, owncloud claims that it can integrate with rclone. Owncloud suggest the use of OIDC-agent which is very complicated. It also suggest enable the use of Basic Authentication which is bad for security.
Nextcloud Docker compose https://hub.docker.com/_/nextcloud/
I don’t do much maintenance on my nextcloud image either. I spend a lot of time setting it up on bare metal because I didn’t know docker compose existed but it’s very popular nowadays. With docker compose you don’t have to setup a lot either. It didn’t break for me once in the past years.
What’s wrong with nextcloud’s S3 object storage?
I use Nextcloud AIO. If you use s3 as primary storage, the backup (using Borgbackup) won’t work.
I started and ended up bailing. The deciding factor for me was the way data is stored with OCIS (basically hashes), so backup/restore would be a much larger pain. So I’m sticking with Nextcloud as much as I hate PHP and dislike the performance issues.
I thought backup/restore would be easier with OCIS 🤔
Not really what you are asking for, but I found the combination of KaraDAV and Filestash to be a great alternative to Nextcloud, and much more stable for basic use.
As for Owncloud… I am skeptical of the company behind them ever since they split off into them and Nextcloud. Probably better to avoid, regardless of what you think of Nextcloud.
Filestash looks awesome! I tried the demo on my phone and it was way snappier than Nextcloud or even Google drive lol. I mostly use Nextcloud for documents and for calender and contacts, so I might replace nextcloud soon given how slow it usually is.
No idea at all, but I am highly interested in your experience. So it would be great if you could came here back to share it with us
Will do. Still reading docs and blog posts. ❤
For what it’s worth, I do think OCIS is worthy of switching to if you don’t make use of all of the various apps Nextcloud can do. OCIS can hook into an online office provider, but doesn’t do much more than just the cloud storage as of right now.
That said, the cloud storage and UX performance is night and day between Nextcloud/Owncloud and OCIS. If you’re using a S3 provider as a storage backend, then you only need to ensure backups for the S3 objects and the small metadata volume the OCIS container needs in order to ensure file integrity.
Another thing to note about OCIS: it provides no at-rest encryption module unlike Nextcloud. If that’s important to your use case, either stick with Nextcloud or you will need to figure out how to roll your own.
I know that OCIS does intend to bring more features into the stack eventually (CalDAV, CardDAV, etc.). As it stands currently though, OCIS isn’t a behemoth that Nextcloud/Owncloud are, and the architecture, maintenance is more straightforward overall.
As for open-source: OCIS released and has still remained under Apache 2.0 for its entire lifespan thus far. If you don’t trust Owncloud over the drama that created Nextcloud, then I guess remain wary? Otherwise OCIS looks fine to use.
I think I should use it for some time along with Nextcloud AIO. The official documentation is very confusing.
Assuming you just want file sync and storage, if you can live without External Storage (having another SFTP/WebDAV/whatever backend), then I think oCIS is great for you. It also expect an OIDC auth provider by default - this guide helped me through. Note that you have to configure the S3 storage driver in oCIS and properly backup your buckets and metadata.
For Talk you can setup an internal Matrix and TURN server too. I recommend conduwuit if you want something lightweight, or Synapse (quite heavy) if you need OIDC integration.
Not sure what you mean by expects oauth.
I’ve been testing it and it works very well so far in my tests with just a normal user name and password to login.
I’ve actually been meaning to work on getting oauth connected to my authentik but haven’t gotten around to it yet
So far the server seems very solid and the clients for android and windows also seem very good.
My bad, I meant the recommended deployment is to bring your own auth provider, but normal username/password is fine too. Glad it works!
I had good and bad times with both. I am finally happy with “pydio cells”
What issues did you face with OCIS?
First, nothing. But I run just my private containers and update them automatically with watchtower. I like it when I could don’t care about things. OCIS was one of the freaky ones. Breaking changes are literally breaking everything. I lose the data and start over two or three times. (The data wasn’t completely lost, I had backups and/or was able to use an older version instead.)
The issue you faced is clearly a scary one!
I am considering switching as well, for similar reasons. What has been holding me back (besides missing time to plan and do the migration) is thst I don’t quite trust ownCloud any more, and due to a lack of documentation, I would want to run it in parallel for some time to get the hang of it before migrating the other users (which adds to the time constraint).
I’ll most likely deploy using their helm chart – does anyone have any real-world experience with it?
If I wasn’t using so many other Nextcloud apps besides the file storage I would switch.
