I will try to answer most of your questions in one post:
@JasGot said in Nextcloud experience:
Are you using NextCloud as a backup? If not, where is your backup?
Nextcloud is not backup. We have backup of it stored in Dropbox. However earlier when we used Dropbox,it was easier to undo accidental deletes (mostly accidental moves) then to restore files from backups. We have recovered now from backups, but I'm worried about what happened in Nextcloud.
@Dashrender said in Nextcloud experience:
huh - you sync 96 GB of data to 40 users for mainly offline use? And you don't have conflict issues (more than one person editing a file while offline?
Plus - MAN, that's a lot of data to replicate everywhere.
Users used to notice conflicts and solved them. Unfortunately they have not used to use files online (mostly becuse they used to use offline MSOffice, and in some cases it was a requirement becuase of VBA macros)
We do not sync all files with all accounts, of course not.
@Dashrender said in Nextcloud experience:
Is the expectation of these 4 sites to use the files in an online state? Is the setup this way because of need/desire for faster access?
On these 4 sites, Linux fileservers serve Nextcloud group folders as local SMB shares, and they also sync them to Nextcloud so that users outside of LAN can see them or edit them if they need. It is setup this way because we had unreliable internet until few years ago, and because of VBA macros that we need to use offline...
@Dashrender said in Nextcloud experience:
Yeah I get all that - though my question is - how many of those files really need to sync back to the PCs?
I'm also interested in learning about your setup - you seem to have the NC sync client on all 40 endpoints, but then you also have sync clients on these four servers. Do they sync different data? Is the server sync'ed data only available to the users when they are in the office accessing the local share? Also, why is that data synced to NC? is that the backup? or at least one part of it? These four servers - is the data the same on all four? your description didn't seem to make that case - it appears that each server has it's own account, and it's own respective data for that location.
Yes, we have 40 users/accounts and four of them are servers. Yes they all sync at least partly different data, but most data are used by more then one user/account/endpoint (some have read only access, some can write/delete...).
Data that servers sync, are accessible by some people from other sites or laptops.
Yes, all servers have own account and it's own data, but they hold their "local" data in their "group folder" in Nextcloud. But those group folders are also accessible to at least some other Nextcloud users (that's why they need to be synced). We also have some local folders that do not to be synced, and they are not in Nextcloud