Advice on Dropbox replacement for a novice/rookie.

[DenisInternet]

Hello!

This is my first post on the forums, a bit of a stab in the dark, but hopefully this is the correct place to post this question. I am trying to find a replacement for Dropbox, and have considered NextCloud as a solution but I realize now that I am a bit out of my depth and could really use some advice.

My workflow: I am a Video Editor/Colorist and I work with very large files, with projects easily going into 1TB+ size. At the beginning and end of the project I share the completed projects and source files back with my clients. Now when a project is several Terabytes, I still have drives shipped to me, which I then ingest on my NAS and work from there. But often at the end of the project a long with shipping back the drive, I also share very large ProRes *.Mov exports, ideally before the drives arrive.

Past solution: My solution in the past has been to use Dropbox. But now on Mac/Apple systems, Dropbox only syncs to your system drive, and even if I did find a way to work around that, the Dropbox client on Mac doesn't support ZFS SMB shares... Another disadvantage is my clients often didn't have a great experience when uploading/syncing/downloading files with Dropbox.

Possible new solution: So I thought of installing Nextcloud on my TrueNAS scale system. This would allow me to more easily and quickly put files on my shared NextCloud server and once my clients upload files onto Nextcloud, I already have them ready to go on my system. Bonus I got very positive responses to the UI so far.

However besides successfully installing NextCloud on TrueNAS scale, I've stumbled in all sorts of issues when it comes to reaching NextCloud outside my local network. From port forwarding issues, to Cloudflare tunnels working with any app except NextCloud, to trying solutions offered by TrueCharts that seem overly complicated/too advanced for a novice/rookie like me. So I thought to ask, what do you guys use? Do any of you use NextCloud? Do you have a dedicated machine just for NextCloud, are there other solutions you folks use/recommend?

Thank you for reading, and I appreciate any tips/recommendations.

 

[Sean Ho]

CF tunnel limits the size of requests and would not be suitable for sharing large files. If you don't mind your home IP being revealed, you could point a DDNS entry to your home IP, then port-forward tcp/443 to a reverse proxy in front of Nextcloud.

 

[j_h_o]

I use Caddy 2 - The Ultimate Server with Automatic HTTPS to reverse proxy self-hosted services. With tcp/80 and tcp/443 forwarded, it provides SSL termination.

There's a few options I can think of:

1. You could combine Caddy with something like Authelia - The Single Sign-On Multi-Factor portal for web apps (running in Docker) to handle authentication and directly share files from your TrueNAS system. This wouldn't require you to duplicate the files -- you could share directly from within specific folders on your SMB share.
2. https://min.io/ (s3-compatible) would allow you to upload files in a browser or in a client that supports s3 file transfers -- but this would duplicate the files on the server.
3. https://www.seafile.com/ (perhaps more Dropbox-like) would also work, but you'd also need to "upload" the files/duplicate them if you're saving directly onto an SMB share. There's a client that handles the syncing though.

 

[Samir]

This is an interesting issue. What do your clients need? Just a link that they can play in their browser? Or the file that they can download and play? I've got some out of the box ideas that might work for you depending on the situation.

Edit: Realized OP may not reply while I still remember the solutions so will post them here.

If playing in the browser, Smugmug is a good service which I've used for almost a decade now that has the ability to have private links and can play directly in a current browser after uploading up to a 3TB file. Only problem is a 20 minute length limit which might be an issue if it's feature length.

And if they need the file, I know a friend of mine uses wetransfer.com to digitally submit her auditions. It's even free for up to 2GB files.

 

[louie1961]

Honestly maybe buy a cheap Linode cloud instance and host your Nextcloud there. I did it on AWS for a while but the economics vs Dropbox weren't great. Maybe it will be better on Linode.

 

[Sean Ho]

if the goal is just to obscure your home IP, but you have enough upload bandwidth to serve files from home, you could get a cheap VPS or cloud VM just to run the reverse proxy and wg tunnel back to home. Then you don't need to pay for large storage on the cloud VM.

 

[Pete.S.]

There is a very simple solution to this that is almost always overlooked. That is to use private bittorrent peer-to-peer filesharing.

Doesn't require you to "host" anything on a separate server, but you could if you want.

If you want to share the files with multiple people, they all become part of the peer-to-peer network (nodes) so they will also share parts of the file/files between themselves.

Bittorrent clients exist on all platforms.

The advantage over cloud storage is that your clients can start their download immediately. You don't need to upload it somewhere first.
It also works on large files. And the download/upload can be interrupted and resumed many time without any problems. Clients can also decide which individual files they want to download from your torrent.

The only consideration is that you want to create a private torrent that you share with your clients - not a public torrent that anybody can download.

 

[BoredSysadmin]

There is a very simple solution to this that is almost always overlooked. That is to use private bittorrent peer-to-peer filesharing.

Doesn't require you to "host" anything on a separate server, but you could if you want.

If you want to share the files with multiple people, they all become part of the peer-to-peer network (nodes) so they will also share parts of the file/files between themselves.

Bittorrent clients exist on all platforms.

The advantage over cloud storage is that your clients can start their download immediately. You don't need to upload it somewhere first.
It also works on large files. And the download/upload can be interrupted and resumed many time without any problems. Clients can also decide which individual files they want to download from your torrent.

The only consideration is that you want to create a private torrent that you share with your clients - not a public torrent that anybody can download.

Isn't what you said basically that just File Sync Software - Sync Home | Resilio Sync but with extra steps?

 

[Pete.S.]

Isn't what you said basically that just File Sync Software - Sync Home | Resilio Sync but with extra steps?

Well, kind of.

Resilio Sync is proprietary P2P and used for syncing - which is not exactly the same as file sharing but pretty close.
There is also open source Syncthing - which is also P2P sync.
So built on the same basic technology as standard bittorrent but not exactly the same.

But what I'm trying to say is that you can share your own files just by using a simple bittorrent client, like qBittorrent or transmission-cli for example. And that is all you need. No need to sign up for anything, no costs, open source, available on all platforms, can be run headless etc.

I think most people don't realize they can use a bittorrent client to share their files, because they are mostly familiar with using bittorrent clients to download public "things".