I also use Nextcloud for this. Works pretty good. The only problem I have with it is that there is no automated way to backup your calendar/contacts.

The Nextcloud Android app has built-in backup of contacts and calendars.

You can backup contacts and calendar usually from within your email client

I disagree. Some piece of Nextcloud always flies off the rails.

In contrast, with Baikal, every time I get a new phone, I have to remember I self host it, then figure out which machine it's running on. Other than that, it's completely maintenance free.

(Usually I'm nervous that sync broke since I last checked three+ years ago, so I download a backup of the DB and confirm it's actually working!)

I tried using Nextcloud several times in the past, but the experience on Android was always sketchy for me. Contacts and calendar that would randomly (and silently) stop synchronizing, their mobile app stuck on endless spinner when browsing photos and files.

It has pretty web interface, but it was just unusable where it mattered.

With DAVx⁵ (https://f-droid.org/packages/at.bitfire.davdroid/) I find contact and calendar sync with Nextcloud to be quite reliable.

That said, for file syncs I do prefer Seafile over Nextcloud. I don't think I'm the only one that prefers Nextcloud just for contact/calendar sync because Mailcow uses the Nextcloud platform just to accomplish that, with file sync disabled.

On desktop the sync integration is fine. It's only on mobile that the experience is lacking.

Try feeding it a redis instance. That caused a "several orders of magnitude" improvement in interface responsiveness and my weird syncing problems stopped immediately.

I also disabled every module and plugin I didn't consider essential.

Same here, and I have many problems with the web interface too. And sometimes when I add an app to my Nextcloud user, the whole instance just stops working and I wasn't able to find a way to recover.

Nextcloud totally breaks down if you try to use it for photo syncing. It can’t handle thousands of files in one directory.

Hows Owncloud doing? They were rewriting to Go, to improve performance in such cases. I kind of lost track though.

The impression I got was that the problem was not related to php being slow but just a general scalability problem. If go runs it 2x as fast, it will still fail with 2x as many photos which is very common. Maybe as part of the rewrite they will address this but I think photos is a fundamentally different problem to hierarchical file storage that they require being split up like how google photos is not part of google drive despite sharing the same storage usage quota.