Files, calendars and contacts that stay mine

What it is

Nextcloud is open-source file sync and sharing. You install a client on your laptop and phone, pick a folder, and it stays in step everywhere. You can share a file or folder with a link, with or without a password and an expiry date. It also speaks the open standards for calendars and contacts, so the calendar app and address book already on your phone can sync to it without anything extra.

It is a web application as well, so everything is reachable from a browser when you are on a machine that is not yours.

Why I run it instead of the SaaS alternative

Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive are polished, reliable and cheap at small scale. If your team lives in Google Docs or Microsoft Office and collaborates on documents in real time all day, those platforms do that better than anything you will host yourself. That is a fair reason to stay.

My use is different. I want my files, calendar and contacts on a disk I control, not scanned, indexed or used to train anything, and not subject to a terms-of-service change I did not agree to. I want sharing links that come from my own domain. And I want the storage to cost what the disk costs, not a per-seat price that climbs each time someone joins.

The trade is responsibility. With Dropbox, someone else worries about the disk failing. Here I do, which is why backups and monitoring are part of the setup rather than an afterthought.

How it is set up here

1. Its own containers. Nextcloud and its database run as their own set of containers on the estate server, separate from every other service.
2. Behind the one edge. The shared nginx edge terminates TLS and routes traffic to it. The certificate is checked daily by the expiry sweep.
3. One identity. The login page offers “Log in with Authentik”, the same single sign-on as the rest of the estate, and it lands on the existing account for that email address. The ordinary password form stays alongside it as a fallback, so nobody is locked out if the identity provider is having a bad day.
4. Backed up off the box. The database is dumped nightly and pulled to separate storage; the whole disk is snapshotted weekly.
5. Watched for real. Uptime Kuma probes it every five minutes and checks for actual page content, so a broken login screen counts as down even when the server says everything is fine.

What it replaces

• Dropbox, Google Drive or OneDrive for file storage and sync.
• Hosted calendars and address books for people who want those on their own server.
• Emailing attachments back and forth, or sharing links from a personal consumer account.

What it costs to run is disk, a slice of the server, and maintenance: updates tested before they go on, backups checked, and someone who notices when the sync client starts complaining. The bill does not scale per user.

What I would do for a client

First, find out where your files actually are. In most organisations the answer is several places at once: a file server, a few personal Dropbox accounts, a shared drive nobody owns, and someone's laptop. The audit maps that and tells you what is exposed by old public links.

Then the recommendation. If you collaborate on documents heavily and already pay for Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, consolidating into that is often the right answer, and I will help you do it cleanly. If you need the data on infrastructure you control, for confidentiality, cost or independence, I would build Nextcloud the way it runs here: single sign-on, backups that leave the server, monitoring, and a written procedure for restoring a file and for restoring the whole thing.

Questions people ask