Nextcloud Desktop Client >2TB of files Endless Sync

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I am trying to run an in house test of Nextcloud for my company, to eventually replace SharePoint. We are hoisting it successfully on TrueNAS & we are able to access via our domain using a Cloudflare tunnel as well as directly via the IP (or using VPN if remote).

The issue we have, is that we want to be able to use File Explorer on all staff machines (circa 20), to interact with the Nextcloud files day to day, such as writing/editing word documents, excel sheets and CAD models etc. I was hoping the Nextcloud Windows Desktop client (version 4.0.5) would work for this, similarly to Onedrive. The problem we have, is that we have a couple of TB of data, so the sync never ends on the client & it restarts every time the PC is turned on again because it never finished due to the quantity of files. Perhaps if we leave the client machines turned on for several days it will eventually sync, but this isn’t practical.

Is this expected behaviour and is there any better way of interacting with Nextcloud via file explorer? I am aware of webDAV access, but that has its own drawbacks such as inability to chunk larger files, as well as being unable to work with Microsoft Windows cloud API which allows local syncing/caching of files with the status symbols (cloud, tick, cross etc) which is essential for us.

I am also aware we could limit the sync to only small folders, but this isn’t very practical either, as we need access to a wide range of project files on the fly.

I have tried other third party solutions such as Mountain Duck, but they’re just not reliable and robust enough for a business solution.

Help would be appreciated as I’m sure we are not the first company to be thinking of using Nextcloud for file servers!

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We have almost 1.7 TB of data on our Nextcloud. While not everyone has access to all the files, I do. I would say it took 6-8 hours to finish syncing the VFS the first time. With that said, I had one PC that just wouldn’t finish, it would error out and start again. Turned out it was a SSD issue. I replaced the SSD and it worked as expected.

In your case, I would look into RaiDrive. They have a free plan (although I would only use it for testing), but I have a few users using it and it seems solid. It is also fairly inexpensive. I think it is a less than $2/month per user on the lowest tiered plan.

RaiDrive is the only 3rd party solution that I found to be acceptable. I tried ExpanDrive, and it had many issues. Integrating into Windows Explorer was a must for me.

3

I have only experience with Nextcloud instances hosting around 500-700 GB of data with more then 40.000 files which worked fine so far. However depending on the number of files, syncing may take a couple of hours, since even with smaller files you may not get much more then a few files per second due to the protocol overhead of WebDAV. But in any case, the files which already got synced should not have to be transferred again.

Edit: at least in Windows the Nextcloud client also supports a mode, where files don’t get synced right away, but they will only be displayed as “placeholders”. Only when you access the file for the first time, it will be downloaded if needed. Maybe this can help you.