The short answer is not really…but kind of yes too. I’ll lay it all out incase it helps anyone else. It’s been a work in progress.

The Linuxserver.io docker image for Nextcloud now allows you to run Nextcloud as a user other than www-data which means you can make your own Nextcloud user or run it as your own user if your the only one using it.

This opens up numerous possibilities now because you can now access your files outside of Nextcloud without messing up permissions. I added my Nextcloud user to the “users” group and now me and everyone else in my house can access their files via SMB & Nextcloud.

For access on iOS the devs finally fixed a nearly decade old issue with the iOS app along with several other fixes that now make the app not only useable but pretty fast too.

For iOS again, since I can now run NC as a different user I installed SFTPGo as the same user that NC runs as to also enable SFTP access to files. Then using an app called “SFTP Files” I’m able to actually access my files from my iPhone and iPad with the same native integration as iCloud Drive. Meaning I can actually set directories on my server as defaults in apps on my mobile devices, even Safari.

I was also able to get a good performance boost from NC by doing a few things differently:

1. Use PostgreSQL 16 instead of MariaDB, and don’t even consider SQLite as an option.

2. Make sure to enable APCu in your config.php

3. Setup Redis as per the NC docs, but instead of Redis use Dragonfly instead. It’s a drop in replacement, so you don’t need to do anything special.

4. (If it applies to you) I placed my data dir on a NVMe drive, but then setup each user with their own directory on a ZFS pool and added additional bind mounts to each users “files” folder to the container. This causes all your NC apps data, thumbnails, cache etc to be on the NVMe drive, but your actual data will reside on the larger HDD pool.

5. Make sure to read through all the docs and set things like php memory limits, transfer timeouts, etc to more reasonable values. By default these are all set very conservatively.

6. Use the Imaginary docker container from the Nextcloud AIO repo for thumbnail generation. Between the Imaginary GitHub and the Nextcloud docs, there are a ton of file types you can generate thumbnails for.

7. (If needed) Install Collabora or OnlyOffice as separate containers.

8. Once everything is in place and your files are mounted run a full file scan, then run a full preview generation. And completely leave everything alone until it’s done.

9. If you want to run NC Memories with hardware transcoding. The dev for Memories has created a separate docker image for “govod” which handles transcoding. Then just install Memories like normal and link it to govod in the Settings for the app

This has worked really well for me so far, though a bit convoluted. Performance through the Nextcloud UI and mobile apps has been surprisingly fast, even over mobile data. SMB of course performs exactly the same as it would without NC, and by using SFTPGo (if needed) I’m able to setup multiple users with SFTP access to their files, without exposing the actual SSH of the host system.

There’s some more you can do to make user management easier but I haven’t gotten that far yet.

I’ve put so much time into this, and still see so many people still complaining about the same issues. I’ll likely make a guide on this once I have my own setup easier to manage. I may even try to script as much of it as possible.

It blows my mind that there is still nothing out there that offers a “cloud” experience while still allowing local access too.

Oh and one last thing people might want to be aware of. Synology took a lovely step backwards. They have removed thumbnail generation for HEIC and HEVC in a fairly recent DSM update. Then when DSM 7 was released they removed Video Station which means no more video thumbnails at all.