Replace Google Drive

What you are actually giving up#

Drive is two products wearing one icon. The file storage is easy to replace. The Docs part is not.

Collaborative editing across organizational boundaries. Two people editing the same paragraph, comment threads, suggested edits, and a link that works for anyone with a Google account. Collabora and OnlyOffice inside Nextcloud do real co-editing and do it well, but every collaborator now needs an account on your server, or a share link with edit rights, and both are friction that Google removed years ago.

Search that reads your files. Drive runs OCR over PDFs and images and full-text search over your documents. Nextcloud's full text search is an app you install, configure and feed with an indexing backend, and it is not as good. If document search is central to your work, look at Paperless-ngx for the scanned-paper half of the problem instead of expecting a Drive clone.

Version history you never configured. Drive keeps revisions of everything automatically. Nextcloud has versions and a trash with retention policies you now own, and Seafile keeps library history until garbage collection removes it.

Uptime and mobile. The Nextcloud Android and iOS clients are competent, not delightful. The gap shows up on a phone with two bars of signal, which is where you will notice it first.

Get your data out first#

Two routes. Use rclone unless you specifically want a cold archive.

rclone config          # type: drive. Create your own OAuth client ID when asked.
rclone copy drive: /srv/drive -P --transfers 4 --checkers 8 \
  --drive-export-formats docx,xlsx,pptx,svg \
  --drive-acknowledge-abuse

rclone check drive: /srv/drive --one-way --combined /tmp/drive-check.txt

What rclone's own Drive documentation tells you to expect:

• About two files per second. That is the practical transfer ceiling, and it is per file, not per byte. A 100,000 file account is roughly 14 hours whatever your bandwidth is.
• Quota exhaustion means a 24 hour wait. User rate limit exceeded is not a retry-in-a-minute error. Making your own client ID instead of using rclone's shared default is the difference between finishing and waiting a day.
• Google Docs are exported, not copied. The default export set is docx,xlsx,pptx,svg. Choose ods,odt,odp for OpenDocument or pdf if the file is finished and you only want it readable in ten years.
• Shortcuts are dereferenced by default, so a shortcut to a 4 GB file downloads the file. --drive-skip-shortcuts if that is not what you want.
• Shared drives are a separate remote. Configure them explicitly, by ID or from the list rclone fetches.

If you use Takeout instead, at takeout.google.com select Drive only, pick your Docs conversion formats, and set 50 GB archives. The download link expires in about 7 days and each archive allows 5 downloads.

Four things that need doing by hand before you cut over:

1. Copy anything under "Shared with me" into My Drive. It is not yours, so it is not in your export.
2. Inventory your share links. Every docs.google.com URL in an email, a wiki or a signature stops resolving to something you control.
3. Export comments that matter. Conversion drops comment threads and suggested edits. There is no fix for this afterwards.
4. Check for .gdoc stubs on your desktop. The Drive desktop client leaves pointer files, not documents. They are worthless once the account is gone.

Which one to pick#

Pick Seafile if files are the job and Nextcloud if documents are. The deciding question is not features, it is whether you will run three upgrades a year: Nextcloud ships a major every four months, supports each for twelve months, and the manual forbids skipping one, so an instance you ignore for eighteen months needs four sequential upgrades, each gated on PHP compatibility and on every installed app being ready.

Two structural warnings. Seafile's data directory is not your files: it is a Git-style store of commits and content-defined blocks, unreadable by any other program, and the manual is explicit that you dump the three databases first and copy the data directory second, so no database row ever points at an object that does not exist. And File Browser is end of life: v2.63.23 from July 2026 is the last release, sessions are JWTs that cannot be revoked, and the maintainers have said there will be no further security fixes. Use it on a LAN or behind a VPN, or use the FileBrowser Quantum fork.

What the migration actually costs#

A 200 GB Drive with 80,000 files:

• Copy down: about 11 hours of API time at two files per second, plus the bytes. Run it overnight, twice, because the second run is fast and catches what the first missed.
• Disk: 200 GB, plus Nextcloud's appdata_*/preview tree, which is regenerable and can become the largest single directory if you enable previews for video and PDFs. Exclude it from backups, not from your disk budget.
• RAM: Nextcloud idles around 600 MB and runs near 1.8 GB in practice once php-fpm workers, the database and Redis are counted. Seafile wants 2 GB and 2 cores minimum for the Docker Community Edition.
• Setup: an evening for either. Nextcloud All-in-One pins PHP and the whole stack together and is the honest recommendation if you are not going to enjoy occ.
• Ongoing: Nextcloud is 4 out of 5 for operational load, and the reason is the calendar, not the software. Two or three upgrade windows a year, release notes each time, and occ db:add-missing-indices after the upgrade that nags you about it. Budget half a day, three times a year.

Back both of them up properly: for Nextcloud that means occ maintenance:mode --on, then a database dump and the data directory taken at the same moment, then maintenance mode off. See Backing up a running database and Backups that actually restore.

What breaks and how to tell early#

Every Google Docs link you have ever sent. Emails, calendar invites, wiki pages, contracts. There is no redirect. Grep your sent mail for docs.google.com before you cancel and count the damage.

Office file fidelity. A .docx round trip through Collabora is good, not perfect: complex tables, tracked changes and unusual fonts drift. Test with your five most complicated documents, not with a blank page.

Third-party integrations. Anything that authenticates to Drive (a scanner, a CRM, a backup tool, a Zapier flow) needs a new target. Most speak WebDAV, which Nextcloud and Seafile both provide. Find them by auditing the apps with Drive access in your Google account settings.

The app-store upgrade trap. If a workflow depends on a community Nextcloud app that has not been marked compatible with the incoming major, you either stay on an unsupported version or lose the feature. Check every installed app against the target release before you start, not after the migration has run.

The tell. Someone in the household or the team keeps a document in Drive "just for now". Two weeks later that is where the current version lives. Ask directly at the two week mark.

The point of no return#

Downgrade the Google One plan, do not delete the account. A dormant Google account keeps your Gmail and your identity working, and the storage charge is the only thing you are actually cancelling. Before you do:

1. rclone check drive: /srv/drive --one-way reports zero differences on two consecutive runs.
2. You have opened your ten most important documents in the new stack and they render correctly.
3. You have restored the database and data directory into a scratch instance and logged in. For Seafile, run seaf-fsck on the restore and confirm it is clean, because block storage makes an untested backup much less trustworthy than a folder of files.
4. Everyone who shared a document with you has been told where it lives now.

Then let the storage plan lapse at renewal and leave the files in Drive for one more billing cycle as a safety net.

Next: size the disks with the Stack planner, and if photos and Dropbox are also on the list, Replace Google Photos and Replace Dropbox are the neighboring migrations. Head to head detail is in Nextcloud vs Seafile; the rest of the category is Photos and files.