I’m here to share a story about my NextCloud journey. Ups & downs and my humble opinion on it. If you are a developer, I hope you read this, give me critical feedback. But I also hope you will learn something from my experience to make the starting approach for the words best piece of software even better.
I installed NextCloud for the first time 2 years back. I was not a linux newbie then nor I am now. But I will also not call myself an expert. I am just able to figure things out when challenges were thrown at me. However, during my first installation, when two clients changed a single folder, my nextcloud started giving me errors of synchronization. I got scared to make the shift from Dropbox.
A year later, I tried NextCloud again. I proudly even shared an account with my colleague too. Then I faced the same problem when he and I tried to work on the same folder. It created some conflict folders even when both of us were not editing the same file simultaneously.
Several months back, I again installed Nextcloud, for the third time. I faced the same issue when I shared an account with the same colleague. But this time, forums I guess had gotton better a hint about the problem existed. the keyword was “lock”. The moment I saw this, I felt “hey wait, Nextcloud is intentionally doing this to protect my folder”. Now I know the error but I needed to learn how to combat this problem, be able to work with my colleague on the same folder, just like we work using Dropbox.
Today, randomly, I found this Nextcloud script. This was a magical script. It mandates a 2GB RAM. This was not said anywhere else except at the last potion of the Nextcloud installation page.
Its follows a different installation procedure. The installation procedure takes MUCH longer, more sophisticated thus I feel it must be much better.
Things work much better. I no longer receive errors when two clients edit the same folder.
My question to the people who like to advice me, why does this script help produce better working NextCloud servers against the easiest method advertised on the NextCloud webpage? How does it help create no conflicts when the folder is edited by two clients.
What I mean by the easiest method is simply downloading the NextCloud tar ball, extract it, make the connections and run NextCloud.
To the developers, I feel advertising this script more will help newcomers like us get more on the working side of Netxtcloud. Be free from difficult scenarios. Why are we recommending non-working methods whilst we have this amazing script at the bottom of the instructions page? What is the reason we use the earlier methods when they have room for the users to “think” nextcloud could not handle errors. I also would appreciate if more experienced people can give me feedback on my thoughts.
One thing I have to mention is that, yes, I did not read the entire 100% of the nextcloud documentation. Its overwhelming, and because I am a student, I cannot afford to put time for it. I simply followed the basic installation instructions i first found on the official NextCloud installation page. I used Amazon EC2, Ubuntu latest instance for all my installations.