@irj said in I have to change cloud drive service yet again:

This sounds really ridiculous! In a business environment you are worried about the difference of. $130 a month? I mean how many hours a month do you spend troubleshooting?
How many hours do you have in this whole fiasco? It seems like alot. $140 a month would save you a ton of money, actually.

Assuming the $140/m product actually works without bugs. The NextCloud setup was hopefully going to fix all the problems we saw with Box.

Again, I've gone over additional training with people using the cloud about exactly how to move files around and verify that it happens. But "the cloud put my files back".

I'd love to command more control over technology and just demand people use it, but that's assuming the product actually functions.
Unless you're suggesting I tell people they aren't allowed to rename files or use cut/paste within cloud folders?

And yes the environment here is a bit toxic in terms of people getting a kick out of whining about tech and using that as a jab on me. I'm often backed into a corner being forced to try and explain why some random service we use doesn't have some random feature they think it should have. Like "well how come I can't XYZ huh huh huh!!?!?!.........well because that service doesn't have the feature..... why wouldn't they put that feature in! It's a basic thing, why why WHY!!?!?!..........um, I don't know, ask them."

I hate being made to explain why other people's software works a certain way or has or doesn't have a certain feature or can or can't do something. As if I work for those people or have any say in how their software runs. I once had to endure a 10 minute lecturing session because the boss didn't like that Adobe has a monthly subscription model for Creative Suite. Chewing me out as if I were literally the CEO of Adobe.
Come to think of it, I often have to be the whipping boy for every technology we use, every time it gives us any grief. They always act like we have unlimited choices in services and so if this one hiccups, there must be 32 more to choose from that not only have every feature we use, but all the features we want, and is also in the right budget.

But I don't want to rant! lol

I really do want a cloud that just works though, handling basic things like reliably syncing files to computers, and can handle file renames and moving files around without creating copies and such.

I don't think it's users fault, which is, of course, what I tend to say for the first 2 dozen reports of issues, but after a while that just gets old.
The users are not doing crazy operations. They just rename files, or do a CTRL-X to cut a file and then go CTRL-V to paste it in another folder. What happens is the "cut" file reappears in its original location even though it appeared to be deleted at first. Sometimes it would be a day or two before a previously cut file suddenly reappears back in the original folder.
Same thing with file renaming. The original file might magically reappear alongside the renamed one.

So user error or not, what keeps happening is that we find duplicate files in multiple folders because the cloud (not the user) mysteriously decided to make the file appear in its original location again, creating a duplicate.

This happens to multiple users from multiple computers and is very inconsistent. Of course every time I try to test these issues, it works perfectly.

Unfortunately I can't use 3rd party tools like Cyberduck or WinSCP because everybody is used to browsing with the normal Windows Explorer experience. When they go to save or save-as from other programs like Word etc, they use the normal Explorer save dialog box to find the cloud folder to save to.

NextCloud is relatively good about creating conflic files if two users edit the same file independently, but we've seen cases where people are POSITIVE they made edits to files and saved them, only to find days later the file they edited is reverted to one without the changes. And the changes they made are NOT recorded in the NC revision system. Those changes just aren't found, despite them being 100% sure they edited the file. And since this has happened many many times for multiple users, nobody trusts the system any more.

After going through Google Drive, OneDrive, Box.com, and now NextCloud, none have worked out. They've all been buggy, inconsistent, create too many sync issues, "lose files", desktop app closes unexpectedly, orphan files between web and desktop, renaming issues, file cut/paste issues, etc.

I've been tasked to once again change clouds and find something else that is hopefully more robust.

We need 40+ GB primarily as a single shared folder for the entire office to use. Although if the boss has their own personal folders for corporate stuff, that would be good, but everybody else just needs access to the one master shared folder.

We have 12 or so desktops and a half dozen laptops and some phones and home computers to connect to.

I was thinking of trying Dropbox this time. Buy two standard users, one the boss/management can share, and one for everybody else in the office to share. Then the 1st account creates the master share and shares that to the other user.

I've always had good luck with Dropbox on my personal one.

Any other ideas, hopefully low budget options? There is no way I'm paying $140/m for Dropbox Business for 11 employees to have their own accounts. It's not necessary here, all way want is shared access to one master folder and very robust desktop sync.

Our NextCloud server is $10/m so if we can keep budget low that would be good. Who knows, I'll probably have to switch again in 3 months when they start complaining of whatever new bugs they come across.

@hobbit666 said in Lots of Nextcloud issues:

Not used NC but are there any logs? Or could you enable extensive logging and a share you know gets the most complaints? To see who is checking a file out and saving changes, then the next.

I don't know about any logs beyond just the activity stream and revisions system. The desktop client also has an activity log that I watch.

What makes this difficult is that nobody seems to know the problem happened right at the time. It's always days if not weeks later that people suddenly "are sure" they updated the file but now the changes are gone. The activity stream will simply lack any edits by them.

Case-in-point. A file they say had about 12 rows of data in it. The activity stream has 5 changes by users and there are 4 files revisions. None of the revisions contain the 12 rows, none of the activity shows an edit by the person who claims to have edited it. But they are SURE they did it, saved the file, it synced, they saw the data there in the file after that, etc. But a week or two later those 12 rows can't be found and there is no history of the changes.

My thinking here is that maybe they did update the spreadsheet, but somehow those changes only remained locally, it just didn't sync. But if this is true, eventually they would get a conflict cause the system would try to sync when it comes back online. Either it would sync the new changes (assuming web version never changed), or the web version would be newer and they would get a conflict file created, which also didn't happen.

I'm feeling like Dr. House right now, I think everybody is lying. NC the desktop client, the end user, Excel. Everybody is lying and I can't find the truth!

@hobbit666 said in Lots of Nextcloud issues:

Could it be Excel "caching" the file on people's machines so when they click save it only saving their changes to a "old" copy? (Just stabbing in the dark)

I don't think so. When Excel opens a file it creates a temp copy, a hidden file with a tilde in the file name, these are excluded by NC anyway. Then when the file is saved, the tmp file goes away. But I don't believe there is any kind of 2nd full copy/cache.

Now, Excel does have an autosave feature. The location is not within NC though, it's down in the user's AppData folder somewhere. So this is likely not an issue. It's not autosaving to the original file, in other words, autosave creates another file somewhere else.

@stacksofplates said in Lots of Nextcloud issues:

Sorry, kind of trolling. But if they are having this many problems with just editing files they shouldn't be able to edit the version of the file that everyone sees. You're almost to the point where you have to do some kind of approval process to have changes made. That sounds ridiculous.

Heck I'd rather do a lot of things.

These Excel files are mainly used for tracking physical inventories, parts on order, incoming/outgoing/received/awaiting/etc.

Much better to use dedicated software for this kind of tracking, but we can't always get what we want. They are used to spreadsheet files, been using them for a decade, so a custom database just isn't in the cards.

Files based on vendor, which also contain lists of our own orders which are awaiting product for the incoming parts, etc. It's been evolved over the years and it's just the way it is. How they manage the files, how they are named, what folders they go in, and how data is entered, all very precise and people trained to use it.

And up until a few years ago these files would have been on a folder share on some random computer in the office. At least with the LAN share if someone opens a file, it won't let another person open it too.

@scottalanmiller said in Lots of Nextcloud issues:

@guyinpv said in Lots of Nextcloud issues:

I've about had it with cloud systems I tell you.

First, your issue is with users, not cloud systems.

Second, the technical thing you are seeing here is sync, not cloud.

You can use NextCloud differently to not have these possible issues.

There are far too many "random" problems for me to just blame users for everything. Especially when we are all aware of these problems are literally verifying every edit.
Open file, edit, close file, wait for sync, open file, check edits are still there, go to another computer, check if file synced, open file, check for edit, looks good......2 days later, changes are gone, nobody has those previous changes that were verified. You can't tell me this is still a user error.

I don't know how else to use NC differently to make all these problems go away.
We update files. Rename files. Move files around. Create new files.

That's it. Very rarely would any two people need to change the same files at the same time, otherwise this would simply end up with a conflict file which is normal and we expect those when this happens.

What we don't expect is for verified changes to files that multiple people saw were updated, to be randomly reverted. We don't expect newer files to be overwritten by older files, I can't fathom how that kind of event can happen. Some kind of weird timestamp issue in Windows?

We don't expect a very normal Windows operation like cut/paste of a file to magically make the cut file reappear at a later time.

These are weird errors, which leave no backtrace of activity or file revisions in the web interface.

@scottalanmiller said in Lots of Nextcloud issues:

@guyinpv said in Lots of Nextcloud issues:

4. I've had complaints that two people will be on the phone with each other. One person is making edits while the other one waits. Person 1 says ok I've saved it and says it synced. Person two opens file but doesn't see changes. This goes on for 30 minutes, supposedly, she waited 30 minutes and could not see those changes.

Are they awaiting BOTH syncs, or just the one? No single person will know if the sync is done. They should be using a non-sync method, like the web, if they want to do it instantly like this. Just like how SMB works.

Right, but when person A says they are done making changes and the icon is green, the other person shouldn't have to wait 30+ minutes for it to sync. I've tested sync speeds and for these files it only takes 5 seconds so it's really weird. One or the other computer is simply not making it to the cloud, or blocked by firewall or I don't know what. The NC client certainly isn't throwing any errors.

@scottalanmiller said in Lots of Nextcloud issues:

@guyinpv said in Lots of Nextcloud issues:

1. Files are cut and pasted to move between folders. The pasted file remains but the cut version also remains in the old location. Even worse, it appears like it really cut (on local machine of course), but later we find the file still exists, was put back, re-uploaded, reverted, whatever. Thus we have duplicate files across different folders.
   Because cut/pasting files seems to randomly fail, this happens like 50% of the time, we're constantly having to re-delete files that should not be there.

This is most likely from one person removing and another person replacing it.

Nobody would replace it, how can they? If I cut a file and paste it somewhere else, NC should be treating this as me deleting the file, which should then propagate to the rest of our users. After all a "normal" file delete propagates and works relatively well. But why would it fail a lot by using cut/paste? What's the difference?

@scottalanmiller said in Lots of Nextcloud issues:

@guyinpv said in Lots of Nextcloud issues:

2. Changes to files don't sync. We work on a lot of Excel and people are complaining they open the files, make their edits, everything appears to save and what not. Then we find out days later the information is missing. The file either saved but later reverted, or someone else's older copy re-uploaded? Or maybe it never sync'd those local changes to begin with? (I'm not sure how that can be because I would think I'd get a conflict file at some point).

So no known issue. This is how a normal file system behaves if people overwrite each other.

Don't see how that's possible. It would not be users overwriting each other, it would have to be the NC client overwriting. But why would it do that? Why would someone else's older file overwrite the newer changes made by the person?

@emad-r said in Lots of Nextcloud issues:

Are you sharing accounts ? or each machine/person has his own accounts ?

Each has own account.

@emad-r said in Lots of Nextcloud issues:

How are you managing shared folders, I am doing user account called shares and that user has folders that are shared like LOG to log group, and that share can not be reshared again.

I have a general "admin" user that nobody logs in to. This user is the one with the master shared folder that is shared to everybody else. We don't have a re-shared type issue. It's just a single folder shared to all accounts by this main user.

@emad-r said in Lots of Nextcloud issues:

Maybe cause it is cloud based you have latency issues, maybe, is the system self hosted ?

I couldn't say, but when I test making changes to a typical Excel file, it only takes a few seconds to sync and then turn green again. So maybe 5 to 10 seconds to sync back to everybody else.

@emad-r said in Lots of Nextcloud issues:

I noticed you say Excel alot, let me tell you one thing. Excel was not meant for sharing PERIOD. no way around it, you want to share excel consider web based spread sheet like:

They aren't sharing like editing at the same time or anything. The people here are too primitive to make them use a web-based browser spreadsheet. Never gunna happen here. We have thousands of spreadsheets.

@emad-r said in Lots of Nextcloud issues:

Other than that forget, 2 users in nextcloud or any other software using the same file will create conflicts, and I noticed Nextcloud handling them very well, It creates the conflict file and keeps the original. The idea with NC, try using the share system of user called share and making folders in this user and sharing it to groups and see if that helps instead of individual sharing files . Making a default shared folder for users in the same dept usually helps.

We are aware of how conflicts work. This is very visual to people when they see a conflict file appear, they know what is going on and what to do about it. But in all the various problems I listed, there is no conflict file created.

@emad-r said in Lots of Nextcloud issues:

But think about the issue your solving, its not NC its the fact that they are using Excel, also what version of Excel on all machines and put the x32 version is possible. I am using 15.0.5031.1000 so please ensure you have the latest. You will now if you have the latest setup files cause it takes 25-30 mins to install.

We have Office365 so everybody is on the latest.

@emad-r said in Lots of Nextcloud issues:

Oh also disable all the NC apps and addons you dont use, I have only Gallery/PDF viewers/Sharing and THemeing and 2 more.
ALso how did you set it up, Check setting it up with PHP-FPM version 7 that might make things faster.

I have no extra addons enabled, pretty raw/fresh install on a new VULTR instance. Everything is up to date. PHP is on 7.