So just to update... I installed an unstable version of Vikunja as a custom app, because some bugs to do with the Todoist migration were meant to have been resolved. The Todoist importer worked a bit better, but still threw up errors. Apart from that the app is working pretty flawlessly from what I can tell. Would be brilliant to have it added (perhaps v1 would be the right time).

I recently got Cloudron running on a Netcup VPS with NFS storage mounted (also provided by Netcup). This works great for moving individual app data for most apps off the main server, but for the Jellyfin app the Docker containerization of data seems to stop there being anyway to actually get the media into the app? A shared volume that could be 'seen' by different apps would be ideal, and this would also be great for something like sharing photos between Nextcloud and Lychee. Is this a feature that is going to be rolled out soon? I read elsewhere that something like this was planned for an earlier Cloudron release.

I've been looking for possible work around using symlink or hardlinks, or mouting external storage in Nextcloud, but none of the options seem to really be viable. Rclone with a cloud provider seems to be a popular solution for Jellyfin, but I'm not sure how this would work? Any suggestions on a workaround that wouldn't break how Cloudron's backups and default behaviour works would be greatly appreciated. I have almost no experience with managing a server, so the less tinkering the better!

I think it might be beneficial to have some stats or tracking mechanism for the server resource usage of users or usergroups in Cloudron, as this would enable non enterprise and multiple user servers to share hardware resources fairly The use case scenario here would be communities or groups of people who want to share, and spread the word on self hosting open source applications.

The biggest variable in my mind, in terms of calculating costs, is the amount of storage a user or usergroup uses. Is there someway to track this, so that a percentage share of storage provisioned can be worked out?

I've read elsewhere that Netdata might be the way to go, to get detailed info on server resource use. Would this work for seeing a Cloudron user's share of mounted NFS storage for instance? Or is this something that is better accomplished from inside specific apps, like say Nextcloud.

@girish Thanks for the detailed response on the issues and limitations surrounding shared volumes. I'm basically just looking for anything that is an upgrade on SFTP and could be an easy way to store and access media across apps on Cloudron that support using shared volumes. And if possible to achieve this without disappearing down a trouble shooting rabbithole myself.

I would be happy to try using a volume that is shared between Jellyfin and Syncthing, if that's something that would work? Syncthing seems to have a good reputation for transferring larger files reliably, and has peformed pretty well on a few test I've tried.

I did read about the unreliability of Nextcloud external storage and issue with Lychee and creating it's own database (which I guess makes it a less desirable all purpose photo manager alternative to Google Photos).

Ok, thanks much for the update. Wish I could help with the packaging, but I've got zero skills or experience to contribute to that. Would be amazing to have this on Cloudron at some point, it seems to be the most promising Google Photos alternative.

@mehdi Thanks! That worked a treat. Setting the right ffmpeg path fixed it and playback is working with and without the transcoding options disabled.

@girish thought I'd flag this for you. As having the ffmpeg path set up right by default, might be useful to make it more seamless for other noobs looking to run Jellyfin on Cloudron. Also, would it be possible to share folders between Syncthing and Jellyfin? Maybe this would be easier to achieve than more complex shared volumes?

I've got Vikunja installed as a custom app (would love to see it published to the Cloudron app store as well).

One of the highlighted features is the ability to import from Todoist, but there's no way to do this through the interface. I asked in the Vikunja matrix chatroom, and someone suggested all the details on how to achieve this would be in the config.yml file. I've looked at this file in my install, but can't see any such section or info. Has anyone figured out how to migrate from Todoist?

Any updates on getting Outline on to Cloudron?

I've been playing around with a hosted version, and have to say Outline seems very intuitive and easy to use, compared with some of the alternatives (on Cloudron and otherwise).

@jdaviescoates mmm... that's a pity. hopefully they'll add other authentication options soon.

Yeah, I was hoping to get a picture of the storage used by a user or usergroup across all apps on Cloudron. Apart from companies or single user installs of Cloudron, the thinking was that enabling groups of people to share a server and switch to self hosted open source
software would involve having insight into the main variable resource - the storage - in order for the cost sharing to be transparent.

I understand that's it's not feasible to implement, so will need to think of other community models for resource sharing. Mounting a users own NFS storage is an option, but Cloudron apps are restricted to a single storage location per app instance. Perhaps users mounting their own external storage in an app like Nextcloud is an option.

Any thoughts on a clean model for this kind of resource sharing scenario? This seems to me an important consideration for "regular" users of Cloudron, who might want to get together in order to make switching over from Google etc. financially viable.

@jdaviescoates mmm... that's a pity. hopefully they'll add other authentication options soon.

Any updates on getting Outline on to Cloudron?

I've been playing around with a hosted version, and have to say Outline seems very intuitive and easy to use, compared with some of the alternatives (on Cloudron and otherwise).

@marcusquinn I don't have any regulatory needs. But it might make sense to reach back into the past, to a reasonable extent, in case a user accidentally deletes files and doesn't realise for a bit.

So just to update... I installed an unstable version of Vikunja as a custom app, because some bugs to do with the Todoist migration were meant to have been resolved. The Todoist importer worked a bit better, but still threw up errors. Apart from that the app is working pretty flawlessly from what I can tell. Would be brilliant to have it added (perhaps v1 would be the right time).

Thanks everyone for sharing your suggestions and insights (this is a very special community, and it's nice to be part of it). I've decided to try encrypted rsync to a Hetzner StorageBox via a CIFS mount. Others seem to be having trouble maintaining the mount with Hetzner Storage Boxes, so hopefully that doesn't happen too often. Even though there might be latency issues, I think this would be better than using a Netcup NFS mount, just so that the backups go to another provider from what the VPS is on.

@girish It would great if Cloudron could add more robust and nuanced backup options at some point. But I can understand that it's not priority at the moment (y'all are doing a great job with Cloudron).

@marcusquinn Your thinking on using the VPS snapshot does make a lot of sense. In my case most of the app data is on an Netcup NFS mount, so snapshoting the server wouldn't be very useful (I doubt the addon storage is included). So I've sort off flipped that on it's head, and will try doing daily rysnc backups (retained for a week) and then weekly automatic snapshots on the Hetzner Storage Box (you get a certain number free, depending on storage capacity). This doesn't have the effect of conserving VPS resources, but should extend the backup range without adding to storage costs.

I have Cloudron installed on a Netcup VPS, and am having trouble setting up a reliable backup strategy that works on a consistently while being cost effective.

Some background info - backup size for the entire platfrom is currently about 850 GB, with most of the data being contributed to by user Nextcloud data. Automatic backups are currently scheduled to run once a week, and the retention policy is set to one month (any opinions on whether this is to lax?).

I would like to use a different service provider for backups (different vendor and geographic region) and also have have encryption enabled, so that the storage provider doesn't have to be trusted.

Initially, the backups were rsync to Wasabi. This worked pretty flawlessly. But Wasabi charge for deleting data, so even though the storage costs are very reasonable, the overall costs quickly become unreasonable.

Then I switched to Backblaze, they don't charge for deleting data, but using rsync causes there to be a lot of API calls, with costs quickly adding up (though not as extremely as Wasabi).

So I switched to tgz backups. This I guess is sub-optimal for having to transfer so much data every time (even though bandwidth is not at a premium or particularly limited). This worked OK a few times after increasing memory limits (up to over 6 GB), but I'm now getting task timeouts and am unable to successfully backup. I've played around with the memory and upload part size settings but still not luck, getting it stable.

Is there anything obvious I'm missing? How do you do backups? Any advice in getting this right would be much appreciated. Ease of admin, cost, elasticity of storage to the actual size of the backups, and security would be the main considerations. Would setting up a separate Minio backup server and using Rsync be a good solution?

I've got Vikunja installed as a custom app (would love to see it published to the Cloudron app store as well).

One of the highlighted features is the ability to import from Todoist, but there's no way to do this through the interface. I asked in the Vikunja matrix chatroom, and someone suggested all the details on how to achieve this would be in the config.yml file. I've looked at this file in my install, but can't see any such section or info. Has anyone figured out how to migrate from Todoist?

Ok, thanks much for the update. Wish I could help with the packaging, but I've got zero skills or experience to contribute to that. Would be amazing to have this on Cloudron at some point, it seems to be the most promising Google Photos alternative.

Any updates on this... would love to have this on Cloudron. Don't mean to nudge, just curious how it's going with packaging.

Update: It appears to be an instance of Syncthing with a particularly long filepath that is causing the backup issue.