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.
I haven’t tested in Windows, but this is my setup Linux to Linux using rclone which the docs say works with Windows.
Server
- LUKS
- LVM
- Volgroup with a mishmash of drives in a mirror configuration
- Cache volume with SSD
- BTRFS /w Snapshots (or ZFS or any other snapshotting FS)
- (optional) Rclone local “remote” with Crypt if you want runtime encryption at rest and the ability to decrypt files on the server. You can skip this and do client side only if you don’t want the decryption key on the server.
- SFTP (or any other self-hosted protocol from https://rclone.org/docs/)
Client
- Rclone Config /w SFTP (or chosen protocol)
- (optional) Rclone Config /w Crypt
- Rclone mount with VFS.
I use this setup for my local files and a similar setup to my Backblaze B2 off site backups.
The VFS implementation has been pretty good. You can also manually sync. Their bisync I don’t fully trust though.
I can access everything through android using https://github.com/newhinton/Round-Sync. Not great for photos though as thumbnails weren’t loading without pulling the whole file last I tested a year ago.