Best practise for Nextcloud setup (NVMe) with additional HDD drives

[Stardenver]

Hi all

Not a native speaker, but will try my best. Like a year or two ago, I decided to test Nextcloud with extended storage. My VPS comes with "just" 200-something GB of storage, which is not enough for all my files (data hoarder). I added a Hetzner Storage Box to my server, which actually worked very well (still using another Storage Box as Backup solution for cloudron). But once I added the Box to Nextcloud (External Storage -> local -> media/hetzner) I could literally watch my VPS storage fill up with data, to the point where the VPS didn't work anymore.

Some research unveiled, that the versioning and/or "trash" system of Nextcloud may have caused this. For some reason my Nextcloud saved different versions of those external files, even though I never really changed them. I later gave it another try but this time I bypassed Cloudron volume function and added the Storage Box directly to Nextcloud as cifs. Same results. Nextcloud hidden files grew and grew and grew and I stopped it once again.

Here I am now, ready to give it another try. This time I got a dedicated server for testing containing SSD (for OS and stuff) and HDD for storage. Cloudron and all apps/services will be on the SSD, while I plan on using the HDD for Nextcloud. Should I - once again - add the HDD as external storage? Or mount the HDD in Cloudron and move the whole Nextcloud installation to this volume?

What is the best way to gain maximum storage from SSD and HDD in Nextcloud, but still avoiding the problems I mentioned?

Thank you all for your help.

[humptydumpty]

I'm hosting Nextcloud on my homeserver and haven't had any issues. I don't remember all the settings I'm running, but I do believe I have versioning either severely limited or turned off completely as I don't see the benefit of it. I have the main SSD installed and not mounting extra boxes. Mini PC's are dirt cheap now, and it's a better route than relying on VPS providers since the hardware is under your control. It's not the feedback you're looking for, but please consider self-hosting NC if you keep hitting walls on a VPS.

[necrevistonnezr]

@humptydumpty slightly off-topic: How do you secure your home network? This is the one area where I believe (not know!) a VPS has a better setup. I have a quite simple router (with a built-in DSL modem) with simple firewall settings (the omnipresent Fritz!Box in Germany) and I'm still pondering a switch to a more sophisticated setup. I haven't found the sweet spot in hardware / software that is more sophisticated than a Fritz!Box but not so complicated that one rather messes up things than configure them correctly...

[humptydumpty]

I’ve got none. Running stock Cloudron with fail2ban on a regular consumer grade router. I think this was discussed before and iirc a VPS does not offer any better protection. I think I have less ports open too 80/443 only which reminds me i can close port 80 since I’m using automated dns now. You could set up a hardware level firewall on your network with opnsense. I tried doing that a while ago and couldn’t get it to work and it’s been on the back burner since.

[Stardenver]

So nobody has any information regarding my question?

[jadudm]

I have a Dell 7040 SFF, with 32GB of RAM.

It has:

1. A 1TB NVMe drive
2. A 1TB SSD
3. An external USB HD (2TB?)

I let Cloudron have the entire NVMe. My Nextcloud instance is on the NVMe. However, I currently do not expect to have more substantially more than 200-300GB of data in Nextcloud.

I run backups to the internal SSD.

I have a cron job that rsyncs (or similar) the backups to the USB drive. The USB drive is mounted using its drive ID, so that it always appears at the same mount point.

There is also a process that pushes (monthly?) my backup to Backblaze.

I probably have too many layers in the backup process, but I had the USB drive around, so I plugged it in.

For network, I run a Protectli box with OpnSense as my firewall. That is not a trivial path; you will have learning to do, if you go that route. I am paranoid, but at the end of the day, @humptydumpty is right: you should be able to configure your cloudron to be as secure as anything you would be running on a VPS.

The only difference, really, is that if the machine at home is compromised, then someone will be inside your network. But, they'll probably be mining bitcoin anyway, and don't care about the rest of your network.

Hopefully that helps.

(If you're trying to store huge amounts of data, I would question whether Nextcloud is your best approach, and give consideration to having a dedicated NAS or similar (which... could run Nextcloud), but you will want to consider using a different disk configuration to support multi-terabyte configurations (I think).)

[girish]

@Stardenver said in Best practise for Nextcloud setup (NVMe) with additional HDD drives:

What is the best way to gain maximum storage from SSD and HDD in Nextcloud, but still avoiding the problems I mentioned?

Is the problem that nextcloud is taking too much space? You said the 200GB disk is filling up. What is the size of your files ?

[ethanxrosen]

also curious about @Stardenver 's original question as i'm considering switching to a server with both an SSD and HDD drives

I have a pretty big nextcloud instance that i'd like to keep on the HDD. I assume I would install cloudron and most of the apps on the SSD, and then bind-mount nextcloud's /home/yellowtent/ folder to the HDD from command line?

Alternatively, is there a way to do this from the cloudron web interface; not volumes, as I think that would exclude my nextcloud files cloudron's backup.

[joseph]

@ethanxrosen use volumes but just disable backups for the app. You should also disable automatic updates and update manually... that way, you can skip backups when doing an update and

[ethanxrosen]

@joseph i think you might've mistaken my question for one about backups, but no worries you guys already had the answer here: https://docs.cloudron.io/apps/#data-directory