Dropbox vs NextCloud

🏷️ General
1

It has been many years that I have been using Dropbox to have the files on my computer synchronized, saved and shared on the Dropbox cloud.

Since my provider offers an interesting price for unlimited data cloud and gives, with an extra yearly cost, Nextcloud to synch the local files to its cloud, I decided to start using Nextcloud and I would like very much to use it in the place of Dropbox.
In about 5 years I never had any problem with Dropbox, instead with Nextcloud I continuously have synchronization errors so that it is impossible to use it.

My question is: why have I never had any problems with Dropbox, while with NextCloud I continuously have synchronization problems that I am not able to use?
What am I mistaken?
Where is my error?
Is my error in the fact I want to use Nextcloud as I used Dropbox?
Or is Dropbox a very good software compared to the level of Nextcloud, so that I have to accept that Nextcloud is not suitable for my use and I have to stop the yearly subscription with my cloud provider?

2

I use Nextcloud since more than 5 years after previously moving from Dropbox to Owncloud due to several security issues with Dropbox.

Since Nextcloud I had no synchronisation problems anymore (Owncloud very often created sync-errors). Because I very often read about problems with Desktop client 3.x and ran into trouble with virtual files I downgraded and still remain with version 2.6.5.
It is the most stable version and better to handle after click on tray-icon.

3

Thank you very much. Can I downgrade to version 2.6.5? If so, how can I do it?

4

You did not mention any version and plattforms you are using.
And no description of the sync issue.

So how to answer your question?

Do you have special use cases?

Personally I am using the sync client an MacOS and Windows for many years without an issue.
Using an old outdated client version is not a recommendation IMHO.
Virtual files on Windows works reliable (Win10, Win11).

1 Like
5

You will find all versions of Nextcloud desktop for Windows here:
https://download.nextcloud.com/desktop/releases/Windows/

6

We are using the NextCloud in our company. We are grant access for 350 users at the moment. 100 of this accounts are syncing their files on windows and 5 users with a Mac.

We have sometimes (so 3-5 times per year) a sync problem but we can fix it very simple.

With version 2.6.5 or 2.6.3 we had a bug which deleted all files and start the sync from beginning. Please use the latest version!
We have version 3.11.0 for all clients in our domain installed and a 27.1.5 server running. No problems at the moment.

In your case I would install a fresh new 28.0.1 server and the latest client. Now you can test it for some weeks and if you have any problems, you can post it here. Maybe it works in 12/2023 very good and you can use NextCloud only :smiling_face: in 2019 (or older) we had many problems but with the latest versions it runs very good :+1: try it :smiling_face:

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7

Nextcloud can do more hence the Clients offers more features. Make sure that you configures the client to your needs.

I had sync problems once, but that was due to double syncing with OneDrive and Nextcloud of same folder. Nextcloud constantly tried to sync the . Files so make sure that you do not have something that “battles” with Nextcloud for the control of the files.

8

Hi, I came from Google drive and I have not seen anything better than that. I left for lower IT costs, I have set up everything on Google (GCP) with S3 compatibility and I have more than 1000 users and more than 300TB of data between buckets (external extorage), (Postgres as a service) redis, load balancers etc…

I migrated the google shared drives to nextcloud.

I have had all the problems in the world with nexcloud, the S3 support (compatible) is pretty bad, the client and virtual drive system is pretty bad compared to google, and the support in general is not the best either (unless you pay).

However the nextcloud server works well, its interface is quite fast (it has a long way to go to be competitive (file locking for example) but the client is extremely slow even with the best settings, for example in my case for some users I have to share more than 1 million files. the client has to count each file and it can take up to 9 hours even with the best conditions,
Users really expect this to work like the mobile version, i.e. no initial file count…
I use S3 (unlimited space) the S3 architecture and nextcloud makes it slow, renaming a folder with files is a challenge for this product,

I suffered a lot with the client before version 3.11 so much that I considered going back to Google Drive and paying them again, but here I am waiting for Nextcloud to improve.

I have tried other webdav clients, such as raidrive, but they are slow, and unfortunately the native windows 11 webdav service tends to “disappear” making it difficult to use.

My conclusion is that Nextcloud is a great product, it can be quite a challenge, but I think if they improve the client it can be a great product. the advantage is that you have control of your data. it has interesting plugins, it feels quite secure.

Best of luck!

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9

If it is really so bad, maybe someone could write an issue.

10

I want to thank everyone for your responses which have made me more confident in NextCloud.
I think my problem arises from the fact that, as we are software developers, every time we recompile the sources, our compilers generate a lot of files at a speed higher than the Nextcloud synchronization speed. So it happens that a new recompilation overwrites the files generated by the previous recompilation while Nextcloud is synchronizing them on the cloud.
In any case, thank you very much for your help.

11

Maybe it could be an idea to look at your development process and setup? For code development repository my assumption is that Nextcloud might struggle. But for use in the push to test environment and for other collaborative space, it is very good.
There is a reason you have git and other repository tools specifically suited for developers.

You can exclude folders and certain files in the client, so you could ommit the rapidly changed files from each developers local space on Dev environment and use tools tailored for devs?

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