I am fairly new in the selfhosting business. I host a few services like Jellyfin or AdGuard, but most of my data just sits on plain SMB shares on my NAS.
I am interested in setting up things like Paperless-ngx, Nextcloud maybe Immich as well. One thing I am struggling with is how to organize all this so I don’t have the data scattered around multiple places or in the worst-case even duplicated. I like the simplicity of network shares and the fact that I am not relying on a third-party application to keep being maintained. I am currently not sure I am willing to give that up. However, I am also intrigued by the features these services provide. I know Nextcloud has the option to mount external storage, but I don’t know which downsides come with that. It gets more complicated with Paperless. As far as I know you typically have a consume directory where you throw in your data and Paperless stores it using its own system in the media directory. This means I either throw in everything or I suddenly have two locations where my documents are stored. If I would mount that media directory in things like Nextcloud I probably wouldn’t be able to find anything because of the different structure and naming scheme.
The idea that I had in mind is that I have a single directory structure of my data that can be used on its own and all these tools are just different frontends and provide different views and information of the same data. Maybe this approach is just something from the past and I should move on.
I should add that I am not planning to expose any of these services to the public. All of this is only accessed from inside my house or using a Wireguard VPN.
- How do you guys handle all this?
- How do you avoid data duplication?
- How do you avoid multiple potential file locations? Is a document in my Nextcloud, in my Paperless or just on the network share?
- Do you prepare in some ways in case an application stops being maintained?
- How has this reliance on multiple services impacted other things e.g. your backups?
After setting up paperless and Immich I struggled with this as well. I had a structure before an was very attached to it. But both, like mentioned below, will organize files in their own way. There are ways to keep things like you had them, export them, whatever. But I deemed it to be not worth the effort.
It took me some time, but I just accepted whatever these do. In particular since I really like those two services mentioned. Data is accessed through them, and that’s it for now. I backup everything through proxmox mechanisms, which is way more convenient then messing with the data in any way.
Should I want to migrate, I can always cobble together a migration script that pulls my data in ways I like.
That very much sounds like me, glad I am not alone :) Your way of giving this control over to the different services is definitely an option I am thinking about. I am just not sure this is the right step to do. As you said, it might take some time to get used to it and might also require some restructuring of my data, but in the end you probably get the most out of each of these services as well.
What type of documents do you process with Paperless? Only “official” documents such as invoices, insurance documents etc. or also others like e.g. a letter to Santa Claus that you wrote as a kid? Only PDFs or also office type documents using Tika and Gotenberg? Do any of the documents change after you added them to Paperless? If so, how do you handle that?