Looking for an automatic upload app for Android

I’m looking for an Android app that will automatically sync my photos and videos (taken with my phone’s camera) to my Nextcloud server, without smashing my mobile data limit. That’s basically it, but I can’t stress the automatic part enough — I don’t have the time to manually retry failed downloads, double-check lists of files to see what gets uploaded, etc.

I tried the official Nextcloud app, but it has two major drawbacks. Firstly, even if I tell it to only upload via wifi, it will upload over mobile data. I’m glad I noticed it when I did, because it could have cost me a lot of money. Secondly, it just doesn’t do automatic uploads. 90% of the files it started to sync failed, and that was it. I had to go in to the app and make it try again. No chunked uploads either, so it was starting over every time. So they failed again. And again. And so I gave up.

So is there anything else out there that might do this? I don’t want to stop using Nextcloud on the server, because it’s just so nice to have the gallery, the API for scripting, etc. And since Nextcloud exposes a DAV interface, maybe there’s an app that does this via DAV, so it doesn’t really care whether it’s Nextcloud or not. I don’t care whether it’s instant upload or daily syncing or what, just as long as it’s reliable, automatic, and wifi only.

Any suggestions?

try QuickPic. i used it once and was ok with the results. but i more or less stopped automated syncing at all b/c of a lack of testing-time.
so please let me know how successful you are and which app you’ll decide upon making the job, finally.

Tried QuickPic — didn’t really give me any feedback on what it was doing. Left it running over night, but nothing got uploaded.

Tried FileExpert — had to add Nextcloud as a DAV service, couldn’t even show the contents.

Tried FolderSync (lite) — kept failing at 99-100%, and then restarting the whole thing. Left it running for hours, and it uploaded some stuff, but I still had to manually cancel and resume a lot (plus the cancel sync button doesn’t work).

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There will be soon a public beta for the next release where the auto upload is heavily improved.
The problem is that android/google changed the way background processes, e.g. uploading stuff while the device is idle, is handled. If the device is too long in idle it just does not upload anything…This restriction is even harder on >6.

Please stay tuned.

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Good to know! Please keep us posted. No matter the timing though, it’s probably not a bad thing to have a strong ecosystem of apps around the Nextcloud server, so if there are any more suggestions, let’s hear them :slight_smile:

@tobiasKaminsky By the way, do you know if the next release of the app will be able to do chunked uploads? I take a lot of longish videos, and don’t have a very fast connection, so for me the issues would pretty much go away if NC could pick up where it leaves off with interrupted uploads.

This has been implemented a while ago, so yes it will be in the next version.

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Fantastic!

Keep in mind chunking is used for 4G only for now.