Unfortunately, as Lemmy doesn’t appear to have an indexed search function I am not sure if this is a common question or not. Please point me to the necessary thread/s if this is answered elsewhere.

I’m looking to continue the ball rolling on my home server. Jellyfin setup was a nice dive back into networking, which I haven’t done for quite some time and the logical next step is to get all the data we want to retain into a single hub.

Most searches seem to point to syncthing with nextcloud, but before I get started, I want to check I am really going in the right direction.

I would like to primarily remove the space burden from my devices and dump them all onto a few drives and a cloud backup (in case of physical loss of drives). I believe syncthing can do this, but some appear to say that it is not an effective archive tool.

I would like to be able to retrieve this data without much hassle for e.g. photo editing, and place the finished file back on the server. Preferably the local copy would be removed again, to reduce the need for extra space on each device. I would like to run this over nextcloud, but might be misunderstanding the software a bit.

  • merde alors@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    5·
    4 days ago

    If you accidentally delete files you shouldn’t, you don’t want this deletion to sync to all your copies so it’s gone for good and the backup doesn’t help.

    edit folder > ignore delete

    and you don’t have to worry about syncthing deleting your backup

    • aksdb@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      4 days ago

      That, on the other hand, is only viable, if you are sure, data never needs to expire. Dedicated backup solutions work with retention policies.

    • Dave@lemmy.nzEnglish
      2·
      4 days ago

      Yip you can do that but then it’s messy! And what if you overwrite a file by accident?

      And if you do lose your hard drive then you have a weird state to restore from.

      I’d much prefer the ability to restore to a point in time that comes with something like borg.

      • merde alors@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2·
        3 days ago

        And what if you overwrite a file by accident?

        you can activate one of the options in the “file versioning” to keep deleted files, up to x versions and however long you want

        And if you do lose your hard drive then you have a weird state to restore from.

        are you writing about losing the backUp drive?

        • Dave@lemmy.nzEnglish
          1·
          3 days ago

          I think versioning is the better option.

          are you writing about losing the backUp drive?

          No, losing your main version. Imagine you have a computer with syncthing and a server where it syncs to. If you chose no deletions, then it will sync all files to the server but all the stuff you deleted (draft documents, random files, photos from that time your kid held the camera button on your phone down and took 3000 photos in 30 seconds) will be deleted from your computer but still there on your server.

          When you computer gets struck by lightning and everything is destroyed but the server is fine, now you have to re-sort out all your files because all the stuff you deleted is still on the server version.

          Your suggestion of enabling the option to keep previous versions is probably cleaner. Personally I prefer to keep previous versions and deduplicate to save space.