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?
Immich and paperless like their own data structure. But they both also just keep your files pretty much intact.
So in order:
That is in my opinion also how these tools are supposed to be used. So this seem like a reasonable approach. It just means that you have to give away some form of power/flexibility in order for the tool to do its job properly. Which is still the point I am struggling with a bit.
To be honest, I am not entirely sure. Nextcloud is a rather complicated service and I haven't looked at it in all detail. I am just assuming that when you create a user account it creates a user directory for you inside the Nextcloud "black box" for a lack of a better term and everything outside of that is by default not available to you. I know you can add external storage to the Nextcloud instance. I guess the user has than also access to that storage from his home folder, but I am not sure how this works under the hood.
That is very much my philosophy. I wouldn't consider switching to a service that stores my data in some weird proprietary format or database where I can't get the originals out of.