It either just manages to work for you (count your blessings) or you'll have some cursed bit set in some forgotten Microsoft table somewhere that means you'll be doomed to a horrible experience forever without a clear cause. Infinitely (not) syncing folders, disappearing files, cryptic or vague error messages. Even on brand-new machines.
The actual goal was to lock your enterprise into Microsoft cloud services.
Now that this goal has been achieved, support for the product has been wound down to the bare minimum required.
Every megacorp fails at product engineering once things are "stable". The incentive goes away from teams investigating and fixing bugs and instead those teams shift to whatever new thing can get them promotions. Google is very known that problem, but it exists at all big corps.
But like come on, I'm actually paying for this. Yes it's just a part of the Office 365 plan, but it _is_ a part of it.
Actually was considering moving to self-hosting just last week. Any recommendations for a self-hosted Dropbox/OneDrive alternative besides NextCloud?
But what do you actually need to share? Folders? Or links to content? PDF? Archives?
Matrix homeservers and clients support most mime types in chat, including zip, so you can send anything and have it searchable in the chat as long as you maintain the matrix server.
Misskey has a "drive" feature, where all media you share goes, but you can also upload directly to it and link directly to media in the misskey drive.
Pastebins work, too. My github^ has the instructions on how to set up the same thing I run, an Up1 pastebin. I'm sure there's better.
But nextcloud has first class mobile clients, understands folders and mime types, can be synced over WebDAV, cifs, http, etc.
So... Up to you?
^ https://raw.githubusercontent.com/genewitch/opensource/refs/...
As for besides NextCloud, just to check my blind spot.
and look, i am sure qnap and Aghyzzicgh from aliexpress might do this too, but i can't speak to them. I bought a synology on recommendation from a friend. My first one got hit by lightning (yes) and i had to buy a new NAS but the drives still work. i've replaced the original drives, but they still work. i installed one in my kid's machine to hold games. My current synology is a 4-bay dualcore with 2GB of ram.
it works perfectly for all this stuff. my phone automatically backs up photos to it when i connect to wifi, for example. If you put your syno on a public IP, you can hotlink to content on it. there may be ACL shenanigans, i have no idea. I don't use it that way.
why don't i use my synology that way?
Because i run a public nextcloud instance to be able to synchronize my photos and documents and hotlink them.
derp https://nextcloud.projectftm.com/index.php/s/synoscreenshot
Do any of the options you listed work reliably?
Litmus test: sync a few million files totaling a few terabytes, including build output directories. Build a few projects on machine A a few times and run the unit tests (most services desync at this point). Perform a full sync of A and then machine B. Build on B. Repeat. Also, on both machines add non-overlapping files (like pictures, screenshots) to the same directory at the same time.
You're looking for storage. Not sync. the clue was "terabytes". Wanna know where i draw the line? you can't sync terabytes to a phone.
I'm not trying to sound like a jerk. All of the things we mentioned are software based airquote "storage", dropbox, syncthing, etc. your original thing was "shared a folder with SO" which is why i asked what the folder was, mostly. Matrix will gag encrypting a TB of data. Misskey's drive defaults to like a gig per user.
Get a NAS, tailscale (or whatever, set up your own VPN with a fortigate or something), and now you rely on no-one but your ISP(s).
Proof that this works, just fine: https://imgur.com/a/q9hLDeH
note: I use both nextcloud (with a real domain name and certs and everything!) which is a VM on one of our machines in a DC. the synology is at my house. The synology backs up to a dedicated machine (it's in an air conditioned outbuilding with dedicated fiber pulls) with it's own redundant storage array, but that machine is "asleep" 99.9% of the time unless i'm pushing backups. My synology is not publicly accessible. It has ~30TB of storage, iirc.
note2: that youtube-rips is 90% <=480p, too!
A set of four thumb drives that sync to each other over their own WiFi network.
The ratio of works super duper to terrifies the IT staff is off the charts.
