A Swiss Physiologist synchronized data from his mobile phone over NextCloudPi to his PC for one week – here he shares what he experienced

Last Updated on January 14, 2024 by pg@petergamma.org

To have physiological data not in the cloud is very important for physiologists like us. We worked on this project as a private project since several years with little success.

We first investigated the Pinephone but we then have let it be. The reasons where

1. x poor battery life
   x high shipping costs and import taxes to Switzerland
   x for privacy office LibreOffice would be great, but it is not adapted to the Pinephone screen
   x there are alternatives like Abiword and Gnumeric
   x but first tests with NextCloudPi made us go back to Android phones
   x NextCloudPi is well reviewed by Applecast from Germany, and it is easily to install NextCloudPi on a Raspberry Pi.

But then we had issues with finding a wired ethernet adapter which worked with our mobile phone. We previously have reported about this:

Issues we had with wired ethernet adapters to connect an Android phone to a router to NextCloudPi to a PC in several tests

• We currently have one adapter which works with our mobile phone. Sometimes it shows 2 ip adresses for our Pocophone, sometimes 1 ip adress, but it works all the same.
• What is nice about the adapter we have that it allows simultenously to charge and shows a blue light if there is power.
• installation of NextCloudPi was quiet easy with the instructions from AppleCast as we said previously
• Then we installed a Windows client for NextCloudPi
• NextCloudPi is easily accessible through a web front end from our PC by entering the ip adress of the Raspberry Pi running NextCloudPi and controlling it through the front end.
• We then also installed the NextCloud Android app on our mobile phone.
• It works at the first attempt to synchronize the example files selected by default by the NextCloud software from our PC over the NextCloud Raspberry Pi to our mobile phone.

Then we worked almost a week every day a bit to get it running for our needs.

• First our major impression is that a Raspberry Pi with NextCloud, especially the software is a bit of an overkill for such an easy task to synchronize data from a mobile phone to a PC without a cloud
• We still stick to this solution since it is quiet a professional solution which is well establised
• But the problem is to configure it correctly is something which has vexed us every day a bit for a whole week.
• To see through the PC client, the NextCloud software on the Pi and in the Android app is difficult for beginners as we are.
• Our goal would have to synchronize office files from Softmaker on our mobile phone to our PC and back.
• But after a week working every day a litte bit on it, we only managed to synchronize office files from our PC over NextCloudPi to our mobile phone, and then open the office files with Softmaker Office
• But then troubles began.
• Softmaker office on Android has led us only save the files to the download directory and nowhere else.
• But how to get the files from there back over NextCloudPi to our PC?
• We managed to do this once by a manual upload.
• We had to study the NextCloud app more closely to find that it is possible there for an automatic upload to choose folders on the Android app as well as on NextCloudPi to synchronize those.
• On this path we managed to synchronize a file to our PC, but it was not possible to synch it back for reasons we do not know.

• How to associate folders with each other which are synchronized from or PC to NextCloudPi to our Android phones is still not clear completely to us personally after a week.
• It seems to be quiet a simple task. But all the software which is used for NextCloudPi is not simple and not straight forward to see it trough.

We suffer since the good old times are gone and we do not have the comfort anymore of our Samsung Galaxy S5 with Android 4.4 in new devices where it was easy to store data on a SD card and process it further on our PC. It was also possible to access this files over and usb connection. But then Google came and made our live complicated most probably to be able to sell us Google Drive subscriptions, but to sync files over Google drive is not a solution for us personally. YouTube video makers welcome to make a video about this challenging topic. But we are not interested in product sellers who want to sell us a NextCloudPi which we reviewed here. We think with the information we published here it is possible to solve the problem we described here, but it takes time to solve this problem properly.