this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2024
30 points (96.9% liked)

Selfhosted

39224 readers
405 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Hi. Sorry for the vague title. Nowadays I'm using multiple computers and get to need files and such from other machines pretty often. My music and photos library has also increased and it's getting much harder to maintain with it being scattered across many machines. Basically I'm trying to have a photo library and plain files(documents, music, etc) shared across computers.

For plain files I'm thinking nfs+samba would be the best approach, but there are problems. They have speed issues, but as I can't afford large space for all my machines I can't keep a full rsync'd local copies everywhere too.

The photos are my bigger concern, as I'm looking for a tagging feature. A plain directory structure would be easy to sync but those tags would differ by programs.. desktop programs like digikam or xnview(sadly proprietary) would work well if I didn't need syncing, but I'm not sure if they'd work reliably with all their configs/files stored over nfs. Plus, these programs would have incompatibilities by platform and not work at all on android.

Web based solutions like Immich or NextCloud Photos appear to be pretty famous nowadays, but I'm not sure about them as well. They seem to be overkill for my purpose, and those mostly tend to be very new & i'm not too sure about their future, as they store tags and such on their own formats.

Edit: Oops, forgot to say. I have multiple servers right now, one offsite running FreeBSD, another running Devuan, and one at home running FreeBSD.

I'd love to hear how others are maintaining their system. Thanks for reading.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] sj_zero@lotide.fbxl.net 2 points 1 month ago (2 children)

The way I've got it set up is I have a Nextcloud\Desktop, Nextcloud\Downloads, Nextcloud\Documents, Nextcloud\Pictures, and Nextcloud\Videos folder, and on each machine I use I point each of those points in windows to use the folder in the nextcloud folder instead of my users folder, then I run the official client to sync the entire nextcloud folder. By doing that, whichever computer I'm on I've got the same stuff in my main folders and anything else I have I can keep in the nextcloud folder. I've also got it on my mobile device just to automatically upload new pictures to the InstantUploads folder, but the app is a bit limited.

I live equally on the road working as at home, and I've got completely different computers for home and travel, so in this way I've always got all my files available since once I start up the computer it automatically starts pulling the local files. If you don't want a full copy of everything on both machines, I think you can tell it to just create links of the files and the client will download the files from the server as they're required, but I prefer having a local copy of the files myself.

[–] hexagonwin@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 1 month ago

I see. Thanks for sharing your setup :)

[–] sj_zero@lotide.fbxl.net 2 points 1 month ago

When I'm using linux, I do something similar, I just sync'd my home folder as my nextcloud directory and that similarly made all my files available.