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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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?
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.
