Hello! How are folks self-hosting online storage, similar to Google Drive?
Some options I’ve found:
- https://filebrowser.org/ (maintenance-only mode)
- https://www.seafile.com/en/home/ (weird disk layout scares me)
- https://tinyfilemanager.github.io/ (i like simple!)
- https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash
A bunch more: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted?tab=readme-ov-file#file-transfer---web-based-file-managers
I mainly just need basic file management features. I don’t plan to share files outside of my tailscale VPN. I do need to support multiple users though.
I’m not considering Nextcloud because that seems too big. I’m also not considering syncthing for this project because I don’t want copies on multiple devices.
I’m currently just using ssh+nautilus and that’s worked great for just me, but something similar to Google Drive would be easier to onboard my family.
Nextcloud, despite you’re not considering it. You can disable or not install the apps you don’t need, like Calendar, Contacts, Photos, Dashboard, Activity, etc.
There’s also a fork of Filebrowser, called Filebrowser Quantum, which I’ve been interested in, though haven’t tried yet: https://github.com/gtsteffaniak/filebrowser
Have you ever used OwnCloud, before the fork?
I hated administrating OwnCloud, and that’s kept me away from NextCloud. OwnCloud was a big, resource hogging, hot mess; did NextCloud do a huge refactor and clean it up?
No, I haven’t tried OC. Lot of people still prefer it over NC. I think both have come quite a long way since then.
I wouldn’t say Nextcloud is hard to maintain, even less so if you keep the number of apps to a minimum. The initial setup may require some work, but small instances are mostly plug and play.
Note that I’ve never used AIO. If going for containers, the community images are better, despite AIO advertised as the official method. I recommend using Podman, check out
https://github.com/0ranki/nextcloud-previews
Also a blog post: https://oranki.net/posts/2025-01-02-self-hosting-my-way5-nextcloud/
I didn’t use OwnCloud, but I haven’t had much issue with Nextcloud. I run it bare metal on a pi 4 and haven’t had issues with resource hogging. Getting php to work when the update to php 8 was a bit of a pain but eventually figured it out.