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.