I moved off a Synology NAS to a self-managed machine and one thing I still struggle to replace is something like a synology drive. Here are my requirements:
- server side store data in a plain FS (I want transparency)
- client side (windows), it must support VFS (download files when needed, support offloading of large files)
- having snapshots of data is a must
I have a 40gbit uplink to my desktop, so if everything else fails I’ll just use samba with zfs snapshots exposed to VSS, but we’re talking some large files still (think several hundreds of MBs) and I’m not sure Blender will be happy working off a network disk.
I’ve been pointed to next/own-cloud previously, but they don’t seem to cover my use case, I think. Should I actually try one of those? I browsed around owncloud’s storage bit (which is written in go), and it seems mostly fitting, but I’ve been told I should steer away from ownCloud towards nextCloud.
Yes, but Nextcloud is the fastest way to have something half done, always buggy and sync issues once you’ve a ton of small files. Too bad Syncthing doesn’t do selective sync because it would just be perfect.
I never had any (major) problems with Nextcloud yet.
I just have following “conflicts” with it:
- It doesn’t follow the “Do one thing, and do it right”-philosophy. It tries to do everything at once. File upload/ sharing, media management (NC Photos), RSS, mail, calendar, contacts, and much, much more. I mean, it’s damn convenient and works pretty fine, but nothing is great. For example, Immich/ Photoprism is way better than NC for photo management.
- There’s a lot of abandonware, or buggy/ unmaintained apps. For example, my “News”-feed looks completely broken for months now.
- The performance isn’t good. I mean, the “server” (an old thin client) isn’t fast at all, but the loading times and responsiveness is just awful. The file upload also takes ages, even from the same network.
- It feels bloated. I think, if I would be more into selfhosting and had more time, I would search for alternatives and split all the NC features I use into their own services, e.g. one for file upload, one for document management, one for managing my photos, an own RSS client, and more.
But, as I said, the ease of use and amount of features is still great. I don’t want to spend three weekends just troubleshooting my server and searching for/ installing dozens of individial services. And for that, it’s good enough.
It tries to do everything at once. File upload/ sharing, media management (NC Photos), RSS, mail, calendar, contacts, and much, much more.
Yes, and all of those things are fundamentally broken / poorly implemented.
The performance isn’t good. I mean, the “server” (an old thin client) isn’t fast at all, but the loading times and responsiveness is just awful. The file upload also takes ages, even from the same network.
I’ve had similar experiences with an overpowered AMD server. It isn’t good at all, but how can I expect a thing written in PHP to be good at syncing files? PHP is good, but certainly not to handle files like NC has to do.
I don’t want to spend three weekends just troubleshooting my server and searching for/ installing dozens of individial services. And for that, it’s good enough.
Fair enough, I just hope you don’t have to spend a month trying to fix whatever is wrong with NC on the next update. For me Synching + FileBrowser + Samba seems to be straightforward to get going and is as reliable as it gets.