Syncthing might be a good option for those that wish to migrate. It is a stable open-source solution for syncing a directory in many-to-many clients situation. The syncthing itself provides no servers. But if you wish to have a central server it could be as easy as just installing synchting on your main machine or a cheap VPS. The UI is good enough and it is stable.
Syncthing has been working very reliably for our agency, with multiple users reading/writing to shared projects, with a NAS elected as "master" (though ST doesn't care who's who). Frankly impressive for an OSS project.
However setting up and managing Syncthing is far from self-explanatory for a non-technical audience. It's OK in our case as we can hand-hold and onboard people in-house, but not ideal. Syncthing's usability would benefit immensely from an updated front-end UX, consistent across platforms.
Dropbox for all its recent dark patterns and upsells is still one of the most intuitive systems. Yes, the client UX has worsened, but the core service retains a very predictable behaviour. A folder is a folder. Shared with X and Y. When un-sharing or deleting a folder or file the options are clearly communicated. Compare this with Google Drive, where a "file" can become orphaned and keep existing in limbo, where it's invisible in the browser or filesystem, but it's discoverable by search. It drove us nuts multiple times making it very hard to track access to old documents without having to update settings one-by-one, etc. Google Drive feels like an afterthought to accompany the otherwise great Docs, Slides. and Sheets.
That's because Syncthing is a different beast. If you want something closer to Dropbox, use Nextcloud, which does basically everything Dropbox does (and more) and has the simple sharing UI you're talking about.
I’ve looked at Nextcloud, however it seems to be missing a key feature for me - the ability to store files server-side only. I want a google drive / Dropbox hybrid solution, where I can keep some directories synced and others permanently on the server.
Does anyone know a solution that allows me to self-host something like this?
I've looked at syncthing, however it doesn't have an iOS app.
Regarding nextcloud - it only seems to do full syncronisation like dropbox does. How can I store large shared directories on the server side only? eg, my FreeNAS box has ~20TB in it, and I'd like to be able to access it as a shared directory, but obviously not sync it to my laptop.
I use both Syncthing and Nextcloud (each for different things). Nextcloud is more akin to Dropbox, and works very well. Syncthing is peer-to-peer, so you don't get a web UI you can browse on your phone and selectively download data (it's "all or nothing" per directory), but I haven't had a single problem with it in years. It just works.
this. i was an old bittorrent sync user when it came up, continued to use it till they made it difficult. probably from day 1. then found out about syncthing and couldnt ask for more. it does take "understanding" to get everything hooked up but once done it just works without any issues
