Hi. Sorry for the vague title. Nowadays I’m using multiple computers and get to need files and such from other machines pretty often. My music and photos library has also increased and it’s getting much harder to maintain with it being scattered across many machines. Basically I’m trying to have a photo library and plain files(documents, music, etc) shared across computers.
For plain files I’m thinking nfs+samba would be the best approach, but there are problems. They have speed issues, but as I can’t afford large space for all my machines I can’t keep a full rsync’d local copies everywhere too.
The photos are my bigger concern, as I’m looking for a tagging feature. A plain directory structure would be easy to sync but those tags would differ by programs… desktop programs like digikam or xnview(sadly proprietary) would work well if I didn’t need syncing, but I’m not sure if they’d work reliably with all their configs/files stored over nfs. Plus, these programs would have incompatibilities by platform and not work at all on android.
Web based solutions like Immich or NextCloud Photos appear to be pretty famous nowadays, but I’m not sure about them as well. They seem to be overkill for my purpose, and those mostly tend to be very new & i’m not too sure about their future, as they store tags and such on their own formats.
Edit: Oops, forgot to say. I have multiple servers right now, one offsite running FreeBSD, another running Devuan, and one at home running FreeBSD.
I’d love to hear how others are maintaining their system. Thanks for reading.
How much data in total do you have? Perhaps 2 or 3 external drives (each large enough to hold all your data) on those laptops could bridge the gap for now. Externals are relatively inexpensive, and using something like Syncthing, they could stay in sync.
I took this approach to consolidate my data to free up drives from machines so I could build a NAS running Proxmox. Then copied that data to the NAS, which is the authoritative data store, the other drives now act as local duplicates.
Alternatively, upgrade the drives in the laptops (depending on how much data you have).
Also, keep in mind growth - once you have your data sorted, watch it grow and use that to predict your need for new storage.
I don’t have that much data now, I usually lack storage (or computer equipments in general) so I tend to not store much. Those laptops have about 1TB storage each so that would hopefully be enough for me now. As they’re old and have ODD I can also have two drives on one, but I’m not sure if that’s needed for me now. I’d avoid external drives as they aren’t really reliable.
Externals are perfectly reliable, it’s how you manage things that matters.
I’ve had (over 30+ years of machines now) as many internal drives fail as externals - which is to say not many.
The key with externals is they lack cooling, so don’t hammer them like an internal. I have some externals that are 10+ years old. One is currently my authoritative drive as I reconfigure my setup. It sits by itself and I tacked on an old case fan to keep it cool if needed. (That said, I do prefer to not use externals, the enclosure is another point of failure, and USB connectivity can be a bit unreliable).
I’d look at your total data, consolidate it into a single drive and folder structure, and duplicate that across the drives you have, using the first one as the authoritative drive.
Then get a cloud backup like storj.io on that authoritative drive, so you get local duplication and cloud backup.