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.

  • MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    1·
    54 minutes ago

    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.

  • Human Crayon@sh.itjust.works
    1·
    5 hours ago

    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).

  • poinck@lemm.ee
    23·
    1 day ago

    We learned the hard way that on a RPi4 you want a very good SD card if you are running nextcloud on it.

    • sgh@lemmy.ml
      12·
      1 day ago

      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.

      • mac@lemm.ee
        3·
        1 day ago

        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

    • ferric_carcinization@lemmy.mlEnglish
      2·
      1 day ago

      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.

    • justblackcoffeeplease@lemmy.caOPEnglish
      2·
      21 hours ago

      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.

      • ikidd@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        21 hours ago

        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.

  • nanook@friendica.eskimo.com
    191·
    2 days ago

    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.

    • Im_old@lemmy.world
      6·
      2 days ago

      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.

    • NotNow@lemmy.world
      31·
      2 days ago

      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.

  • grue@lemmy.world
    3·
    1 day ago

    *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!

  • kayzeekayzee@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    1·
    2 days ago

    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

    • justblackcoffeeplease@lemmy.caOPEnglish
      1·
      20 hours ago

      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.