That’s actually quite cool to know.
I’ve always wanted to make my own Cola, especially since I can’t tolerate even small amounts of caffeine. Thanks!

I never had any (major) problems with Nextcloud yet.

I just have following “conflicts” with it:

• It doesn’t follow the “Do one thing, and do it right”-philosophy. It tries to do everything at once. File upload/ sharing, media management (NC Photos), RSS, mail, calendar, contacts, and much, much more. I mean, it’s damn convenient and works pretty fine, but nothing is great. For example, Immich/ Photoprism is way better than NC for photo management.
• There’s a lot of abandonware, or buggy/ unmaintained apps. For example, my “News”-feed looks completely broken for months now.
• The performance isn’t good. I mean, the “server” (an old thin client) isn’t fast at all, but the loading times and responsiveness is just awful. The file upload also takes ages, even from the same network.
• It feels bloated. I think, if I would be more into selfhosting and had more time, I would search for alternatives and split all the NC features I use into their own services, e.g. one for file upload, one for document management, one for managing my photos, an own RSS client, and more.

But, as I said, the ease of use and amount of features is still great. I don’t want to spend three weekends just troubleshooting my server and searching for/ installing dozens of individial services. And for that, it’s good enough.

If you have a spare laptop/ PC, I insist you to try Nextcloud.

It’s super easy to install, you actually just download the Docker all-in-one container and it runs in less than 10 minutes. You don’t have much to loose.
I’m relatively happy with it.

I mean, to be fair, NC isn’t perfect. It sometimes feels a bit wonky and tries to do everything, while exceeding at nothing.
But it’s damn comfortable to set up and maintain.

It doesn’t perfectly cover your use case, but everything else (individual services, including web server, database, etc.) is less centralised and more complicated to set up.
Since NC AIO is inside a container, all data are too. It’s a relatively straightforward file system afaik.
Backup also is included, but you have to do it manually by default and it stops the services while doing it.

For offloading large files, you might look into 3rd party tools. NC is basically a remote drive you can connect to with most programs that support it.

I get the same messages, despite using uBlue.
It’s because of Flatpak.

I disabled the notifications and enabled daily/ weekly auto-updates of Flatpaks, otherwise I would get spammed to oblivion.