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?
  • Lemmert@reddthat.comEnglish
    1·
    3 hours ago
    • Just like czl I do have seperate apps for each type of data I use. For example Ente for photos and Syncthing for keeping the documents folder of my devices synced up.
    • It’s not something I really think about because my data sources are functionally disjoint. (e.g. I don’t have photos from my phone in my documents folder). The only exception is Ente, where I do keep a plaintext copy of the “shared with family” account to display some family photos on our digital photoframe. This also “answers” your next question.
    • I don’t have anything set up for when an application stops support. I do however do look beforehand whether it’s possible to extract my data in a way I can migrate to another platform if need be. For example, some services like Ente offer an easy plaintext way to export/backup your data in directories mirroring your albums. That way I could easily head to Immich
    • It hasn’t really. I usually do backups by keeping two copies of all my volumes. So running more services doesn’t really impact much of anything.

    A sidenote on Nextcloud: it does use the same folder structure in its data volume as it presents to the user. So it’s fairly easy to manage, but you need to update the folder you made the change within the container for it to show up. When we used to keep photo’s synced up with Nextcloud, I could directly access that folder for the photoframe. Since Ente is e2ee I needed to duplicate data in that case