I am fairly new in the selfhosting business. I host a few services like Jellyfin or AdGuard, but most of my data just sits on plain SMB shares on my NAS.
I am interested in setting up things like Paperless-ngx, Nextcloud maybe Immich as well. One thing I am struggling with is how to organize all this so I don’t have the data scattered around multiple places or in the worst-case even duplicated. I like the simplicity of network shares and the fact that I am not relying on a third-party application to keep being maintained. I am currently not sure I am willing to give that up. However, I am also intrigued by the features these services provide. I know Nextcloud has the option to mount external storage, but I don’t know which downsides come with that. It gets more complicated with Paperless. As far as I know you typically have a consume directory where you throw in your data and Paperless stores it using its own system in the media directory. This means I either throw in everything or I suddenly have two locations where my documents are stored. If I would mount that media directory in things like Nextcloud I probably wouldn’t be able to find anything because of the different structure and naming scheme.
The idea that I had in mind is that I have a single directory structure of my data that can be used on its own and all these tools are just different frontends and provide different views and information of the same data. Maybe this approach is just something from the past and I should move on.
I should add that I am not planning to expose any of these services to the public. All of this is only accessed from inside my house or using a Wireguard VPN.
- How do you guys handle all this?
- How do you avoid data duplication?
- How do you avoid multiple potential file locations? Is a document in my Nextcloud, in my Paperless or just on the network share?
- Do you prepare in some ways in case an application stops being maintained?
- How has this reliance on multiple services impacted other things e.g. your backups?
To be honest, I don’t really have a use-case for it, because I don’t really need any of the sharing and collaboration features which are kind of the main point imo. The only compelling reason is that I read somewhere that it is a good option to backup mobile devices. I know that Nextcloud is a real beast of a software and there are probably some more lightweight options out there for that purpose.
I never heard about any of those two, but it looks like file browser is going to be archived in September if that is the one you mean.
Yes filebrowser is ending it’s a shame, very simple tool. Copyparty works fine too but too many features I don’t need.
I don’t have a better suggestion for mobile backup. I only have pictures (immich) backed up automatically. Everything else on my phone would be lost or it already sits somewhere else from the beginning (like music)
So your pictures are automatically backed up using the Immich mobile app? That’s probably good enough anyway. If you want to, you can always setup something like Syncthing to get other files as well.
I can imagine. I just skimmed through their Github page and saw the claim:
These swiss army knives of software can be challenging. But I guess that’s also true for Nextcloud, probably even more so.
Yes, immich sends all my pictures to the homeserver AND I can immediately see all my partners pictures pop up on my phone. Immich is very cool for that.
I too dislike that immich “scrambles” my pictures. I had it quite well organised over multiple decades (folders per year & location), but how well immich works seems worth losing this idea of organisational control over the collection. The immich duplicate detection for example is superb (it isn’t on nextcloud). It for example detects very easily that a 400kb sent or received picture is actually the same as a 4Mb much higher resolution original picture with a completely different filename and different metadata.
I still have my pictures collection organised old school from before immich on various back-up media and the hardest part to me now is deciding to keep that or convert it all to the “immich style” directory… Since it’s now very difficult to add new pictures to it without loads and loads of duplicates.
I did find the setting in immich which will somewhat still organise it in folders per month now, but it’s not the same, since a month often isn’t a logical grouping directory, for example if you go on holiday last week of December+ first week of January: pictures will still be spread across various folders.
My main downside on immich currently is that we can’t easily “share” metadata over a few different users (locations added later, recognised faces etc) although we share many faces/locations in pictures… It’s a hard choice wether I still want to make the few users all use the same account after all because of that (which will have other downsides like no personal private folder)
I didn’t know it has that feature, but that’s quite nice.
Yeah, i think it’s the same for Paperless and Immich. It is just a different approach. If you have tags, facial recognizion/OCR, some form of album/collections and other searchable metadata it doesn’t really matter how it’s organized in the filesystem because you can search it easily.
It’s this metadata that opens up the possibility of a separate frontend and backend. Whereas in the olden days it was backend all the way with meticulously naming files and folders.
It is probably better to let the tools handle it themselfs instead of forcing your old habits onto the tools.
Thanks for the whole writeup about your Immich experience. I am definitely coming back to it, when I test it out.