My brother and I would like to have some sort of storage space in each others’ systems as an offsite backup thing. Ideally, I’d be able to allocate him 2GB of space that he can drop files in (e.g. a Veracrypt container, perhaps a keepass database, not media files). I don’t want him to be able to access anything else on my network, like my own computers when they’re switched on.
Is Nextcloud a solution? I’d like a sort of Dropbox-equivalent solution where I can just open up a bit of space to him without it being access to anything else. Assume he’s not a malicious actor, but also that I want my stuff to stay private.
Have you looked into Syncthing? It’s super easy to set up without having to configure any ports/proxy/etc.
Another strong vote for Syncthing. It sounds like exactly what you’re looking for and it’s dead simple to set up, low resource (far lighter than next cloud), E2EE and expressly limited as far as what directories you give access to.