OpenMediaVault VS Nextcloud

I almost forgot to mention that we need to have a NAS server accessible from the network of our Kubernetes cluster. I have my server configured on a Raspberry pi 3 where a HDD has been attached to it and has been published on the network by using Openmediavault.

You might want to consider the previously mentioned MergerFS and SnapRAID, or MDADM and LVM for your setup. OpenMediaVault [https://www.openmediavault.org/ is a solid choice in this regard. Additionally, if you're planning to run something like Proxmox, you could look into deploying Starwind CVM on top of it. Pretty much like in this guide: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/resource-library/starwind-virtual-san-vsan-configuration-guide-for-proxmox-vsan-deployed-as-a-controller-virtual-machine-cvm/ .

You would better to install OMV instead. It's a ready to use fileserver solution with web interface.

So I'm working on a similar setup with an ancient desktop my in-laws were getting rid of. I installed OpenMediaVault directly to the hard drive (it's so old that I assume it wouldn't work too well as a hypervisor), with a 4TB external HDD attached. OMV supports Docker by means of a plug-in and I'm running a Jellyfin container with no issues at all. I'm still manually downloading everything to the HDD but *arr containers are my next step, as well as setting up a gluetun container to route all that through a VPN.

That is possible (it's automated to a certain extent). It also depends on the NAS OS. Unraid, for example, can work with drives of different sizes while using the largest one for parity. TrueNAS uses ZFS so you won't be able to just add a drive to your RAIDZ and expand it. There's also openmediavault: https://www.openmediavault.org/ that uses Linux Software RAID and you can add a new drive there but you can't combine drives of different sizes. And there's also Starwinds NAS that supports both Linux Software RAID and ZFS: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/san-and-nas. Plus, I would avoid SMR drives in RAID: https://nascompares.com/answer/list-of-wd-cmr-and-smr-hard-drives-hdd/

I'd put it like that: if you have a spare PC, then it's definitely worth trying. I would also look into openmediavault (minimal RAM needs): https://www.openmediavault.org/ and Starwinds NAS (supports both ZFS and Linux software RAID): https://www.starwindsoftware.com/san-and-nas

If complete self-hosting is a must, I now need some file server capable of generating shareable links, to be used in my Markdown image components. In summary, Syncthing is great for Dropbox-style backups, but can't share links, NextCloud is too resource-heavy and Seafile is interesting but apparently has proprietary encryption, which left me with the lightweight Filebrowser

In my opinion it’s not a good alternative if you or your team members expect exactly the same quality of service. When you switch to Nextcloud you’ll have to expect more bugs, less reliability, less performance and obviously more maintenance (since it's typically self-hosted) compared to Google Drive, Dropbox or One Drive. So you'll have to go into this with a different kind of mindset. What you gain is independence and extendability due to a rather big platform ecosystem.

E.g. here are some specific things and examples of things you'll have to deal with, in no specific order. These are just some things I've had to deal with recently.

- You'll have to educate people in your group that there are at least 3 different ways to share files among each other and that they can all coexist in parallel (Individual Shares vs. Group Shares vs. Group folders vs. Circles/Teams) (I did a german blog post on this: https://bitbetter.de/blog/nextcloud-freigabe-chaos/)

- Handling of file/folder names with special characters is a mess e.g. if you have Windows and Linux clients there will most certainly be conflicts. (Luckily this has been fixed recently by the `forbidden_filename_characters` config option – which is not enforced yet via the Web UI) see https://github.com/nextcloud/ios/issues/2802

- Creating Nextcloud users with spaces in their names, will break CalDAV on iOS Devices (https://github.com/nextcloud/server/issues/15641)

- Nextcloud (aka Collabora) Office is very slow if you want to actually work collaboratively with it (no matter the power of your Collabora server) – unfortunately it's no match for Google Docs or Office 365

See Configuration and syntax changes and Special packages. The latter this time includes changes around PostgreSQL, which should be upgraded to 16.1.

Nextcloud——File Sharing and Collaboration Platform

Website: Nextcloud

It really is hard to leave Gmail when all of your data has been conveniently stored therein. This is one of Google's retention strategies and it is indeed brilliant.

That said, there's a vast number of self-hosted alternatives like Stalwart Mail (email) [1], Immich (images) [2], NextCloud (Google Docs) [3], etc.

[1] https://stalwa.rt

[2] https://immich.app

[3] https://nextcloud.com/