Okay So I’ve spent the last couple of weeks trying to set up a personal cloud server, and I’ve made some changes overtime to my approach, but here’s the gist of what I’ve been trying to do currently:
Originally my plan was to use NextCloud for everything. I would have my work files in my /home/david/work folder synced with my work files in my /users/david/work folder on windows. I would have these files made accessible from the web via the NextCloud web gui, and I could easily create links and share files with people as I chose.
This has turned out to be a bad solution because NextCloud does not like you directly manipulating files on the machine that is running the server. It prefers you to do stuff through the web gui or on a separate machine that is running as a client. As I am using my desktop as a server AND as a client, whenever I change a file on the desktop, or I move something around using the File Manager, it gets wonky and out of sync with the nextcloud system as a whole. Basically the intended use for Nextcloud, as I understand it, is to run the server as a server, and leave it alone, while using any of the files or manipulating them etc exclusively through client machines.
So then I decided to try using Syncthing. My plan is as the above picture shows, to use Syncthing to sync the laptop and the desktop, while having nextcloud run on the desktop and make files available through the web interface for sharing etc. Syncthing is having a super hard time syncing these folders though as projects range from a few folders with extremely large binary files (Hi poly 3D scans of landscape using photogrammetry), to many hundreds of thousands of small folders with tiny text files ( such as config folders for VScode that have node module dependencies.)
So, I’m taking a step back and trying to do this process over again as a clean slate, and since that’s what I’m doing it makes sense to look and see if there are perhaps better technologies to use.
I do want NextCloud. I know that. Seafile has a lot of dope features but I def want to have the web gui, user permissions, ability to stream media, install apps, cloud edit documents, etc.
But Seafile seems more efficient for syncing than NextCloud or Syncthing, from what I’ve heard. It has delta syncing at least, and that seems that should help some with this process. And the ability to mount my large Archive drives by the Seafile seadrive function rather than using WebDav or SFTP sounds enticing.
But I’m also not clear if Seafile is the actual solution I’m looking for. As I understand it, Seafile files on the server are in a special format that can’t be manipulated or messed with. In that case I’m basically back to square one with the problem I had with NextCloud right? If I wanted to use SeaFile for syncing I would not be able to directly interact with those files on my Desktop server, correct?
I could hypothetically, I guess, run the seafile server off of the desktop and then mirror that the home folders of the desktop using the client app, but that would require using twice as much hard drive space for every file, correct? Because I’d basically be maintaining a server copy and a client copy locally.
Is my understanding of Seafile etc and how I could use it with NextCloud correct?