Would it be reasonable to expect a Raspberry Pi 4 to run Nextcloud and manage a photo backup of +100 Gb?
The Raspberry Pi is from 2020, running Raspbian, and it was used as an intervalometer with the help of gphoto2 (meaning no great efforts were demanded from it).
The pictures are on two external hard drives
*1Tb WesternDigital SATA (bought second hand, but “like new” according to the sales guy.
*320Gb WesternDigital SATA (inherited from an AcerOne laptop once I realized it could not even handle lubuntu)
My very limited knowledge on the subject tells me I need to:
*Get rid of Raspbian and install Raspberry Pi OS
*Install Nextcloud (and upgrade an existing account)
*Upload +100 Gb
Would the aforementioned steps allow me to access the files on Fedora/Kubuntu (two separate hard drives on a desktop) and openSUSUE (on a laptop)?
I’m also testing a filen.io account and a sync.com account. All three services (NextCloud, Filen, and Sync) work as I expect on an Ipad.
Filen and Nextcloud have Linux applications, and both have been working without problems on test backups of 100 pictures.
Sync is CANADIAN but not Linux friendly (I tried Wine, didn’t work, gave up)… I’m accessing a free account via Firefox only, so I’m not counting on them for this journey.
So, long story short, I want to back up my files (mostly pictures/scans and some pfd documents) on someone else’s computer and locally.
Now the question. Can anyone recommend a guide to achieve what I want?
I’m a cook by trade without any technical (software/hardware) training who has been using Linux (openSUSE, Ubuntu, Arch, Mint) since 2012. Please forgive any mistakes on terminology.
I included a picture of my intervalo-Frankenstein-meter from 2020.
Thank You.
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Do you need nextcloud? Its resource heavy and slow on the best of days.
So if not you could run syncthing plus a web based file browser, and immich or similar for photos.
Do you need nextcloud?
I am looking for an alternative to proton drive. It does not seem like the Linux app is happening anytime soon, and I want to be able to have a backup of the pictures I duplicate and edit without having to download the file and upload it after the changes I make.
In which way do you plan to transfer your photos to the backup storage? In the picture I can see a camera and I assume it uses an SD card. I would, if I were you:
- Buy a consumer grade storage device with USB port, like those desktop storage towers from WestDigital
- Build a RAID with it if the data is important enough
- Connect it to my computer and just run
rsync
Some storage tower even comes with an Ethernet port and a web interface. It’s practically a personal “cloud”.
Nextcloud is resource heavy, slow, hard to setup, and hard to backup/restore. This is from someone who has been using it from when it was Owncloud.
In which way do you plan to transfer your photos to the backup storage?
The pictures I currently have and want to save are on an external hard drive and on proton drive. Any (future) pictures I take are:
- sent to proton drive from my iphone, or
- transferred from the camera’s SD card to my computer and then added to proton drive using firefox.
Because proton does not have a Linux app, the problem with this workflow is that I need to download every picture I want to edit, and then upload it back to proton.
The options I have are:
-
switch to windows (that is never going to happen).
-
switch to mac (I am temped, but the idea of having to buy a new computer every two years because they become obsolete bothers me a little).
-
stay on Linux and use nextcloud on an iphone, an ipad, a dell optiplex 7010 and a toshoba satellite (both with 4Gb RAM).
In the picture I can see a camera and I assume it uses an SD card
That was just a picture of the RPi4 I want to use for this project. Back in 2020 I ran gphoto2 on it and used it as an intervalometer.
Your suggested setup would allow two hard drives to be synchronized, but the web archive (proton) would still need constant downloads and uploads.
Free filen and nextcloud accounts have allowed me to do what I want… take a picture with the phone, upload it, edit it on that service’s folder, see the changes on every other device.
Well one thing to point out is nextcloud and other sync programs are not backups, they’re sync software.
But syncthing would work fine for keeping changes in sync between systems.
I might have a misconception of what back up is.
Right before writing this, I used an ipad to take a picture of one of my cats. That ipad has the filen, nextcloud, and sync apps. I added the same photo to a test folder on each of the services I just mentioned. I can see the picture in the test folder of each service on my desktop.
Those are all free accounts, yes. I am not a paying customer yet. If that is not a backup, I don’t know what to call it.
Basically a backup is a point in time snapshot that you can restore from. So you’d run backups daily or multiple times per day and can easily get back deleted or changed files.
Whereas with a sync service if you delete that file or change it, the original is gone and you can’t get it back. Some will have versions and trash cans, which gives you some limited ability to restore.
Be careful with “like new” claims. I’ve had people in the past pull that with me, and the drive had 8 years of time on it.
If possible, serverpartdeals.com has an excellent range of used drives. Stick with the manufacturer refurbished. They come with a good warranty and so far have been rock solid for me (5 year timeframe).
What’s the little tiny display in the photo? I’ve been looking for something like that.
https://www.waveshare.com/wiki/3.5inch_HDMI_LCD
I found it on buyapi.ca but they no longer sell it. The site shows:
3.5inch HDMI LCD, 480x320, IPS Unfortunately this product is no longer for sale so it cannot be reordered.
If you search for “HDMI LCD” you’ll find some similar displays. buyapi.ca
Thanks, I appreciate it.
We learned the hard way that on a RPi4 you want a very good SD card if you are running nextcloud on it.
I will be using an external hard drive for the backup.
I got burned way too many times thanks to SD cards, one time I had a very good SD card fail way too early and can’t trust them anymore since then.
If I was supposed to do something like this, I’d consider using a SATA disk with an adapter.
This is why I don’t use raspberry pis and just opt for mini PC’s these days. Price per unit is too high and then failure rate of SDs is also too high.
I keep a couple around, but I highly doubt I’ll ever buy one again
I haven’t used nextcloud, but having /var on an actual disk might help, if nextcloud writes to it often. Even if it doesn’t, it might still help a bit as a lot of software does, so it will still reduce the writes to the SD card.
You don’t actually need much on your root partition. Only /etc, /bin, /lib & if it’s separate, /sbin. Most distributions (inc. recent Debians, not sure which version rpi os uses) have symlinked /bin, /sbin & /lib with their /usr counterparts. This means that the binaries & libraries actually reside under /usr, so it has to be on the root partition, but /usr/local should be safe to move.
This means that you can put all the absolutely required directories on the SD card and everything else on a real drive.
Try NextcloudPi
Thank you. I am reading their Q&A forum, realizing that the price of what I intend to do will be blood and tears. That’s fine. We like it that way.
IME, NCP was very simple and easy to set up. I used it for years until the AIO docker came along. But that’s not appropriate for a Pi in my estimation. Though it might be fine on a Pi, it’s certainly how I like to run NC, and I’ve used every method of running it over the last decade.
Thanks
Can you do it? Yes. Will the performance suck outright? Yes. Nextcloud is a pig. I run it on an 18-core i9-10980xe server clocked at 4.5 Ghz with 256GB of RAM, with RAIDED nvme disk, and I don’t find the performance adequate on this platform.
Thanks
Hum, not my experience. I run it on an old pc as a podman container, for me and my wife, exactly for the same use case of OP: auto uploading the pictures/videos on our phones. Upload is almost instantaneous. Browsing files is fine, but I usually use a separate software to index/search the photos on the upload directory. For all kind of files (documents etc) is good.
C’mon man, gotta 100 wait states on your RAM? I run it on a Intel i3-8100T @ 3.10GHz and it’s fast enough. The only thing that sucks is it’s written in PHP.
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You can also try https://syncthing.net/
I would rather have all synchronized data on external drives. Would syncthing allow me to work on USB hard drives?
Yes, it will just sync a folder between computers
I used to run it on rpi4, and now on rpi5 with docker. Just use an ssd instead if the SD card option.
The backup is on an external hard drive. I wouldn’t trust an SD card for this. Thanks.
*Get rid of Raspbian and install Raspberry Pi OS
In case you didn’t know, they’re the same thing: “Raspberry Pi OS” is just the newer name for it.
That said, the official instructions for upgrading to a new major version say to re-image your microSD anyway. So never mind; carry on!
Thanks. You are correct, they are the same thing. What I meant was the OS needs an upgrade.
Yeah I’m pretty sure a raspi 4 is up to the task. I ran a 512 GB jellyfin server on a raspi 3 for a few months, and the only issue was with transcoding video/audio (raspi doesn’t have the right hardware acceleration for that).
Never used nextcloud, but yeah you’ll probably want to update to 64-bit raspi os
Thanks for your reply. I do have the eventual video taken in between pictures. The way this is going, I might back up 1 or 2 Gb at first, to see how it all works out.
