zorcat27

If it is helpful. The NextCloud is just all of the software for a locally hosted cloud type storage system. You'd buy a server and set it up with a linux distro and install nextcloud. Then your whole office could use it as storage just like a normal nas. It just has the extra benefits of being able to access it through a web environment along with adding it as a network location for local use. You wouldn't have to worry about an internet connection for anything other than software updates/installation. You would just need to make sure everyone who needed to access it was on the same network with it. I hope that helps clarify what we meant by NextCloud. You don't need to pay them to host, you can throw it onto a local server machine and benefit from a cloudlike storage nas environment.

If you do want to setup a cloud based system, I (a college student with vary basic linux and sys admin skills) setup a few NextCloud servers for a company I worked with over the summer. It wasn't too challenging and has some cool features. Side note: I would recommend adding the Collabora app onto your install of nextcloud even if you don't activate or use the collaboration functions. It adds some functionality where your nextcloud will be able to handle windows naming conventions of files, ie: you could have MyFile.txt and MyFile.pdf in Windows no problem, but without the Collabora plugin, NextCloud saves the files as MyFile on the server without the extension in the name which will cause a problem. Ironically, it still remembers the file extensions when accessing them on a Windows computer, it just doesn't use it in the name during storage so filenames can clash. NextCloud is pretty cool and easy to setup. You can use it in a web format or add a network location and use the webdav protocol to access and upload data to it. They have a client too, but we didn't use it. If you don't use it at work, it could be a fun project for home use too.