*** FURTHER UPDATE: 27-DEC-18
We continued operating the Nextcloud 15 instances in development mode. We are convinced it has some operational bugs but as far as we can tell they do not impact stability or security (they are ‘annoying’ because they are pervasive). But the instances themselves are stable and operating without significant issue. We have continued with the auto-syncing instances plan in these development servers and that has performed well. They act as one server: you change a file in one instance, and within a few minutes, all servers have the changes. It’s not terribly useful because it does not sync file-links and such, but it’s a reasonable back-up option for a power cut on one of the servers. We are going to upgrade this development set-up to Production status and begin the retirement of our Nextcloud 13 servers. This could be an interesting phase, since the Version 13 servers have performed well (but are approaching end of update life).
*** END OF UPDATE
As much as we really hate to say this: Nextcloud 15 is a poor replacement for Nextcloud 13, albeit SO FAR. Just too many bugs to make it even worthy of our time for evaluating right now. We have reported some bugs, but not all of them as they are too non-reproducible. Maybe we were too quick off the mark, but one thought struck us: would we have fielded our first Nextcloud a year ago if we had seen as many errors and strange results in THAT version? #NotSure. We are very glad we have Nextcloud version 13 running – it has proven to be rock-solid for us.
We will wait for the next stable release of Nextcloud version 15 before we even TRY to evaluate this updated version further. Hopefully it will be a lot more consistent and error-free.
We still like our plan to set up several auto-synchronizing Nextcloud ‘nodes’, but we have abandoned our plans to look at using Nextcloud 15 for this project, so it goes on-hold for a while.