@girish I was thinking potentially to use syncthing with volumes, and then use filestash for web access, sharing etc.
Nextcloud is great, but its a bit of a slow giant that's resource intensive. It tries to do a lot of things and doesn't do the core function of syncing files very efficiently.
so just to update my results here - i tried a hetzner storagebox, but the cifs storage mount was having some stability issues. and it was so painfully slow as to be practically unusable.
so i switched to another option that i've seen mentioned in the forums here, which is to backup to a second cloudron using minio. and i'm happy to report that it's working fine. using an alphavps storage vps it's actually even cheaper, and it's quite convenient to have a further backup if needed.
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!
@p44 i just followed the one in the cloudron docs (and also the hetzner docs).
cloudron:
//<server>/<remote_folder> /backups_cifs cifs uid=yellowtent,gid=yellowtent,user=<user>,pass=<pass>,iocharset=utf8,x-systemd.automount 0 0
hetzner:
//<username>.your-storagebox.de/backup /mnt/backup-server cifs iocharset=utf8,rw,credentials=/etc/backup-credentials.txt,uid=<system account>,gid=<system group>,file_mode=0660,dir_mode=0770 0 0
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.
@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).
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.
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.
so just to update, I got the video working by adding the below line to the env.production (turns out it was just a syntax error 
) and then running 'php artisan config:cache' in the terminal -
MEDIA_TYPES=image/jpeg,image/png,image/gif,video/mp4,video/mpeg,video/3gpp,video/quicktime
instagram import still isn't working for me (this might be a deal breaker for people looking to move over). and the way the federation works doesn't seem to allow you to find people and posts on other instances easily yet.
Anyone have any thoughts or ideas on this? Perhaps some kind of solution using syncthing?
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.
Any updates on this... would love to have this on Cloudron. Don't mean to nudge, just curious how it's going with packaging.
@mehdi @jdaviescoates Thanks for the heads up on that. It sounds like it ticks a lot of the boxes. Will give it a go, and update how I get on here.
@p44 sometimes in cloudron it would say 'this is not a cifs mount' or something similiar. even though it seemed to have been mounted properly, and showed up when checking via ssh. it could just be something to do with mounting it incorrectly though. i figured it was not worth troubleshooting, because of the slow speeds.
@atrilahiji that would be brilliant! I don't have any packaging skills, but happy to help with testing or anything else.
@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?
@p44 i don't use it anymore. i've switched to a storage vps on alphavps, with a minio backup.
any updates on filestash? seems like it would be a great light weight alternative to nextcloud.
@robomod thanks for the tip, i might just wait for the next release before i try to use it then.
i can confirm that the order of the steps @onlybro describes work to enable video posting. so i guess including the config line by default as @robi suggests, would make it work for everyone?