Hello,
I have around 3/4TB of photos (i store a JPG and a raw file) from maybe years. I just have them on a (external) 4TB HDD, and once a year i back them up to another (external) 4TB HDD (that i for the most part stored on the same location). I recently build a small homelab, just one old gaming pc. Now I and my family use Nextcloud notes, nextcloud contacts, nextcloud calendar, nextcloud phonetrack and more. I thought it would finally be a good time to transfer the photos to a ssd and use them with nextcloud so everyone can view the photos anyware! I run proxmox, so I want to buy one 8TB ssd (or 2x 4TB SSD Raid 0) and use it with something like truenas, to make it available for another proxmox vm where i host nextcloud.
Few questions: can nextcloud store this much? And will it cost any performance? The photos don’t really have any metadata, i just stored them in a folder structure like 2017 -> September ect, will this work with nextcloud? And the most important question: how can i make a GOOD backup system for this? I tought maybe a (encrypted) backup in the cloud, but its just expensive and i dont like the dependence. Any ideas?
Hopefully you can give me some tips and insights about how you would handle this. Thank you!
Nextcloud can easily handle 4Tb, I’ve seen guys with 50Tb instances with no issues
The backup problem is eternal. If you can, set up a consumer NAS somewhere else than where your server is and back up daily to it. Even over a slow connection, you should be able to get by after the first full backup.
If you can’t do that, either you go without backups and learn the hard way when your systems fail (I’m currently doing that, still waiting on the find out phase), or you will have to pay someone to store your data somewhere. From what I hear backblaze is affordable, but they do charge you per download. For 4 Tb, they would charge $180/year, with added costs per download which hopefully you can avoid.
A final alternative is to store cold backups somewhere else (at work, for example). Buy 2 external disks, and back up your server to one of them. Store it at work, then do the same with the other disk. Every month, rotate the disks. Your backup solution probably has a function to do exactly that, so you can leave one plugged in, accumulating this months data over time.
I haven’t noticed anyone else bring it up, but you mentioned in passing the possibility of using a RAID 0. I’d avoid that except in very specific circumstances. They’re potentially fine for a scratch disk type of scenario, but if any member of the array fails, the whole array is toast. The chances of a failure increases with was each disk added, so a RAID 0 is less reliable than a single disk. I definitely wouldn’t want to trust my family’s photos to it.
I run 120TB on a VM with 2 cores and 2gb of ram. Data storage is not very hardware intensive. Now serving the data to dozens of users is where you’re going to have issues.
I backup to Backblaze B2 (6$/TB a month), but I have much less data. I also backup all my data to another disk that lives in the same server. Id probably continue doing manual backups to external drive due to the cost of cloud backups
i think nextcloud will work perfectly fine.
for backups you can either have a secondary server at a relative’s home (use syncthing for syncing files) or go for a dedicated server, hetzner is pretty cheap.