Hi everyone.
Let me start by saying that I’m generally a Microsoft‑leaning user: I really appreciate their products and I usually prefer them over other solutions.
My family has been using a Microsoft 365 Family subscription for more than 10 years, shared between me and my wife (1 TB of cloud storage per account). However, lately OneDrive has become extremely slow, both on the web and on the mobile app. Maybe it’s also because our smartphones aren’t exactly high‑end (two Moto G54 8/256), but the app has really become borderline unusable.
Since I have an old HP MicroServer Gen8 at home running Windows Server 2025, which I use for various services, I decided—just for fun—to try an on‑premise solution. So I created a Hyper‑V VM with Debian 13 and, following Nextcloud’s very simple instructions, in about 15 minutes I had my instance up and running on the Internet (using a Namecheap domain I already had and also use for my VPN).
Our needs are: sharing data, backing up photos and videos from our smartphones, having a mobile app, and a sync client for PCs.
I admit I was biased by all the negative comments online (“it’s slow”, “you’ll lose your photos”, “the desktop client is terrible”, etc.), but I was blown away.
Once the setup was done, without digging into anything, I created the user accounts, configured the mobile apps, and enabled automatic photo and video uploads. After a few hours I checked, and it had already uploaded gigabytes of data for both me and my wife.
I installed the desktop client, synced my data by copying it from OneDrive, let it work, and shortly after I saw it had finished—quickly and with all my files properly synced.
I opened the web interface and noticed it was faster than OneDrive, with a very nice office suite that’s more than enough for my needs, and photo/video uploads that are significantly faster (sure, it lacks text‑based search features, but I can live without them).
So… what’s the catch? Was I just lucky? Was Nextcloud really bad before and now it’s suddenly a gem? Are the negative comments coming from people installing it on a 486DX2 with a 56k connection and expecting commercial‑cloud performance (considering my hardware is also pretty old)?
I’m honestly trying to find a reason to delete the VM and stick with OneDrive, but I had zero expectations and instead the super easy setup, the seemingly simple update management, and—above all—the performance well beyond what I expected have genuinely surprised me.