Hello,
I have around 3/4TB of photos (i store a JPG and a raw file) from maybe years. I just have them on a (external) 4TB HDD, and once a year i back them up to another (external) 4TB HDD (that i for the most part stored on the same location). I recently build a small homelab, just one old gaming pc. Now I and my family use Nextcloud notes, nextcloud contacts, nextcloud calendar, nextcloud phonetrack and more. I thought it would finally be a good time to transfer the photos to a ssd and use them with nextcloud so everyone can view the photos anyware! I run proxmox, so I want to buy one 8TB ssd (or 2x 4TB SSD Raid 0) and use it with something like truenas, to make it available for another proxmox vm where i host nextcloud.
Few questions: can nextcloud store this much? And will it cost any performance? The photos don’t really have any metadata, i just stored them in a folder structure like 2017 -> September ect, will this work with nextcloud? And the most important question: how can i make a GOOD backup system for this? I tought maybe a (encrypted) backup in the cloud, but its just expensive and i dont like the dependence. Any ideas?
Hopefully you can give me some tips and insights about how you would handle this. Thank you!
TrueNAS is the way. Spend your $ on quality enterprise level HDDs and use ZFS for your array. You can run your Nextcloud service in a jail (docker) in the same machine. I used Free/TrueNAS for a decade (exclusively on Dell mid-tower desktops) and the only complaint I had was that I could not use DAS to shuttle data on/off.
I also kept 32T in cold storage off-site just in case of fire / natural disaster.
I recently broke down my last NAS (70+T) before moving onto a small sailboat full time. Now like you I am using individual HDDs and mirrored them for redundancy. I miss the hell out of my NAS.