Essentially looking for a shared drive that family members or friends can upload files to without having to make individual users / accounts Anyone know a good way to do this (self hosted or another service if Foss / private)

  • @vegetaaaaaaa
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    51 year ago

    FTP requires a installing a thick client, is an old, insecure, complicated protocol, doesn’t play well with firewalls… FTP must die! https://mywiki.wooledge.org/FtpMustDie. At least use SFTP (not FTPS) which is built-in to SSH servers and much simpler to setup. But then good luck explaining normal users how to configure a client (WinSCP is decent but sill requires some configuration) unless they are running Linux (most file managers support SFTP in a simplified way).

    An alternative is Samba/SMB (multiplatform file sharing protocol Linux/OSX/Windows) - configuring it is a bit involved, but definitely doable. Client setup/file manager integration is OK.

    But I would rather use Nextcloud for this, a simple web interface is probably more intuitive for non-technical users. And you get other features such as comments, tags… if that’s your thing. Can also be accessed from desktop file managers using WebDAV.

    SMB would probably have the best performance of the three, though. Depends on the number and size of files being shared.

    • @[email protected]
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      31 year ago

      Interesting point. I’m looking at some alternatives, I didn’t even realize just how insecure it was.