/j hey some of us only have 10GbE

Jokes aside, I get the classification. I’m pretty solidly in the category of 2c - more tech than some medium business but without the SLA to go with it.

Apologies for being late, I wanted to be as correct as I could be.

So, straight to the point: Nextcloud by default uses plain files if you don’t configure the primary storage to be an S3/object store. As far as I can tell, this is not automatic and is an intentional change at system creation by the original admin. There is a third-party migration script, but there does not appear to be a first-party method of converting between the two. That’s very good news for you! (I think/hope)

My instance was set up as a standalone, so I cannot speak for the all-in-one image. Poking around the root data directory (datadirectory in the config.php), I was able to locate my user account by internal username - which if you do not use LDAP will be the shortened login name. On default LDAP configs, this internal username may be a GUID, but that can be changed during the LDAP enablement process by overriding the Internal Username field in the Expert LDAP settings.

Once in the user’s home folder in the root data directory, my subdirectory options are cache, files, files_trashbin, files_versions, uploads.

• files contains the “live” structure of how I perceive my Nextcloud home folder in the Web UI and the Nextcloud Desktop sync engine
• files_trashbin is an unstructured data folder containing every file that was deleted by this user and kept per the trash folder’s retention policy (this can be configured at the site level). Files retain their original name, but have a suffix added which takes the form .d######... where the numbers appear to be a Unix timestamp, likely the deletion date. A quick scan of these with the file command in Linux showed that each one had an expected file header based on its extension (i.e., a .png showed as a PNG image with an expected resolution). In the Web UI, there is metadata about which folder the file originally resided in, but I was not able to quickly identify this in the file structure. I believe this info is coming in from the SQL database.
• files_version are how Nextcloud is storing its file version history (if enabled). Old versions are cleaned up per a set of default behaviors to keep more copies of more recent changes, up to a maximum age deletion threshold set at the site level. This folder is stored in approximately the same structure as the main files live structure, however each copy of each version is appended a suffix .v######... where the number appears to be the Unix timestamp the version was taken (*I have not verified that this exactly matches what the UI shows, nor have I read the source code that generates this). I’ve spot checked via the Linux file command and sha256 that the files in this versions structure appear to be real data - tested one Excel doc and one plain text doc.

I think that should get a fairly rough answer to your original question, but if I left something out you’re curious about, let me know.

Finally, I wanted to thank you for making me actually take a look at how I had decided to configure and back up my Nextcloud instance and ngl it was kind of a mess. The trash bin and versions can both get out of hand if you have frequently changing or deleting/recreating files (I have network synchronization glued onto some of my games that do not have good remote save support). Retention policy on trash and versions cleaned up extraneous data a lot, as only one of those was partially configured.

I can see a lot of room for improvements… just gotta rip the band-aid off and make intelligent decisions rather than just slapping an rsync job that connects to the Nextcloud instance and replicates down the files and backend database. Not terrible, but not great.

In the backend I’m already using ZFS for my files and Redis database, but my core SQL database was located on the server’s root partition (which is XFS - I’d rather not mess with a DKMS module from a boot CD if something happens and upstream borks the compile, which is precisely what happened when I upgraded to OpenZFS 2.1.15).

I do not have automatic ZFS snapshots configured at this time, but based on the above, I’m reasonably confident that I could get data back from a ZFS snapshot if any of the normal guardrails within Nextcloud failed or did not work as intended (trash bin and internal version history). Plus, the data in that cursed rsync backup should be at least 90% functional.

I forget where I originally found this and Google on my phone was unhelpful.

My favorite annoying trick is x -=- 1. It looks like it shouldn’t work because that’s not precisely a valid operator, but it functions as an increment equivalent to x += 1

It works because -= still functions are “subtract and assign”, but the second minus applies to the 1 making it -1.

Probably best to go with something in the 3.5" line, unless you’re going enterprise 2.5" (which are entirely different birds than consumer drives)

Whatever you get for your NAS, make sure it’s CMR and not SMR. SMR drives do not perform well in NAS arrays.

Many years ago I for some low cost 2.5" Barracuda for my servers only to find out years after I bought them that they were SMR and that may have been a contributing factor to them not being as fast as I expected.

TLDR: Read the datasheet

I don’t have a full answer to snapshots right now, but I can confirm Nextcloud has VFS support on Windows. I’ve been working on a project to move myself over to it from Syno drive. Client wise, the two have fairly similar features with one exception - Nextcloud generates one Explorer sidebar object per connection, which I think Synology handles as shortcuts in the one directory. If prefer if NC did the later or allowed me to choose, but I’m happier with what I got for now.

As for the snapshotting, you should be able to snapshot the underlying FS/DB at the same time, but I haven’t poked deeply at that. Files I believe are plain (I will disassemble my nextcloud server to confirm this tonight and update my comment), but some do preserve version history so I want to be sure before I give you final confirmation. The Nextcloud root data directory is broken up by internal user ID, which is an immutable field (you cannot change your username even in LDAP), probably because of this filesystem.

One thing that may interest you is the external storage feature, which I’ve been working on migrating a large data set I have to:

• can be configured per-user or system-wide
• password can be per-user, system-wide, or re-use the login password on the fly
• data is stored raw on an external file server - supports a bunch of protocols, off hand SMB, S3, WebDAV, FTP
• shows up as a normal-ish folder in the base user folder
• can template names, such as including your username as part of the share name
• Nextcloud does not independently contribute versioning data to the backend file server, so the only version control is what your backing server natively implements

Admin docs for reference: https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/admin_manual/configuration_files/external_storage_configuration_gui.html

I use LDAP user auth to my nextcloud, with two external shares to my NAS using a pass-through session password (the NAS is AD joined to the same domain as Nextcloud uses for LDAPS). I don’t know if/how the “store password in database” option is encrypted, but if anyone knows I would be curious, because using session passwords prevents the user from sharing the folder to at least a federated destination (I tried with my friend’s NC server, haven’t tried with a local user yet but I assume the same limitations apply). If that’s your vibe, then this is a feature XD.

One of my two external storage mounts is a “common” share with multiple users accessing the same directory, and the second share is \\nas.example.com\home\nextcloud. Internally, these I believe is handled by PHP spawning smbclient subprocesses, so if you have lots of remote files and don’t want to nuke your Nextcloud, you will probably need to increase the PHP child limits (that too me too long to solve lol)

That funny sub-mount name above handles an edge case where Nextcloud/DAV can’t handle directories with certain characters - notably the # that Synology uses to expose their #recycle and #snapshot structures. This means that remote mount to SMB has a limitation at the moment where you can’t mount the base share of a Synology NAS that has this feature enabled. I tried a server-side Nextcloud plugin to try to filter this out before it exposed to DAV, but it was glitchy. Unsure if this was because I just had too many files for it to handle thanks to the way Synology snapshots are exposed or if it actually was something else - either way I worked around the problem for now by not ever mounting a base share of my Synology NAS. Other snapshot exposure methods may be affected - I have a ZFS TrueNAS Core, so maybe I’ll throw that at it and see if I can break Nextcloud again :P

Edit addon: OP just so I answer your real question when I get to this again this evening - when you said that Nextcloud might not meet your needs, was your concern specifically the server-side data format? I assume from the rest of your questions that you’re concerned with data resilience and the ability to get your data back without any vendor tools - that it will just be there when you need it.

I’m not entirely sure what you’re seeking to accomplish here - are you looking to just impose authorization on a subset of the images? Probably those should be in a non-public bucket for starters.

Looking to only give certain people access to files and also have a nicer UI (a la Google Drive / Photos)? Maybe plain S3 isn’t the play here and a dedicated application is needed for that subset.

Pre signed URLs may also be a thing useful to what you’re trying to to solve. https://docs.min.io/docs/javascript-client-api-reference.html#presignedGetObject

Adding on one aspect to things others have mentioned here.

I personally have both ports/URLs opened and VPN-only services.

IMHO, it also depends on the exposure tolerance the software has or risk of what could get compromised if an attacker were to find the password.

Start by thinking of the VPN itself (Taliscale, Wireguard, OpenVPN, IPSec/IKEv2, Zerotier) as a service just like the service your considering exposing.

Almost all (working on the all part lol) of my external services require TOTP/2FA and are required to be directly exposed - i.e. VPN gateway, jump host, file server (nextcloud), git server, PBX, music reflector I used for D&D, game servers shared with friends. Those ones I either absolutely need to be external (VPN, jump) or are external so that I don’t have to deal with the complicated networking of per-user firewalls so my friends don’t need to VPN to me to get something done.

The second part for me is tolerance to be external and what risk it is if it got popped. I have a LOT of things I just don’t want on the web - my VM control panels (proxmox, vSphere, XCP), my UPS/PDU, my NAS control panel, my monitoring server, my SMB/RDP sessions, etc. That kind of stuff is super high risk - there’s a lot of damage that someone could do with that, a LOT of attack surface area, and, especially in the case of embedded firmware like the UPSs and PDUs, potentially software that the vendor hasn’t updated in years with who-knows-what bugs lurking in it.

So there’s not really a one size fits all kind of situation. You have to address the needs of each service you host on a case by case basis. Some potential questions to ask yourself (but obviously a non-exhaustive list):

• does this service support native encryption?
  • does the encryption support reasonably modern algorithms?
  • can I disable insecure/broken encryption types?
  • if it does not natively support encryption, can I place it behind a reverse proxy (such as nginx or haproxy) to mitigate this?
• does this service support strong AAA (Authentication, Authorization, Auditing)?
  • how does it log attempts, successful and failed?
  • does it support strong credentials, such as appropriately complex passwords, client certificate, SSH key, etc?
  • if I use an external authenticator (such as AD/LDAP), does it support my existing authenticator?
  • does it support 2FA?
• does the service appear to be resilient to internet traffic?
  • does the vendor/provider indicate that it is safe to expose?
  • are there well known un-patched vulnerabilities or other forum/social media indicators that hosting even with sane configuration is a problem?
  • how frequently does the vendor release regular patches (too few and too many can be a problem)?
  • how fast does the vendor/provider respond to past security threats/incidents (if information is available)?
• is this service required to be exposed?
  • what do I gain/lose by not exposing it?
  • what type of data/network access risk would an attacker gain if they compromised this service?
  • can I mitigate a risk to it by placing a well understood proxy between the internet and it? (for example, a well configured nginx or haproxy could mitigate some problems like a TCP SYN DoS or an intermediate proxy that enforces independent user authentication if it doesn’t have all the authentication bells and whistles)
  • what VLAN/network is the service running on? (*if you have several VLANs you can place services on and each have different access classes)
  • do I have an appropriate alternative means to access this service remotely than exposing it? (Is VPN the right option? some services may have alternative connection methods)

So, as you can see, it’s not just cut and dry. You have to think about each service you host and what it does.

Larger well known products - such as Guacamole, Nextcloud, Owncloud, strongswan, OpenVPN, Wireguard - are known to behave well under these circumstances. That’s going to factor in to this too. Many times the right answer will be to expose a port - the most important thing is to make an active decision to do so.

I’m not the commenter but I can take a guess - I would assume “data source” refers to a machine readable database or aggregator.

Making the system capable of turning off a generic external service in an automated way isn’t necessarily trivial, but it’s doable given appropriate systems.

Knowing when to turn a service off is going to be the million dollar question. It not only has to determine what the backend application version is during its periodic health check, it also needs to then make an autonomous decision that a vulnerability exists and is severe enough to take action.

Home Assistant probably provides a “safe list” of versions that instances regularly pull down and automatically disconnect if they determine themselves to be affected, or, of the remote UI connection passes through the Home Assistant Central servers, the Central servers could maintain that safety database and off switch. (Note - I don’t have a home assistant so I can’t check myself)

I don’t think I’ve seen that movie, so that explains why I missed the joke

I’m still lost… I’ve been following the XZ thing since it broke, so I get the context, but I’m not sure how the meme at the bottom is connected?

Isn’t the point of PGP/GPG that there’s no central database?

As others said, depends on your use case. There are lots of good discussions here about mirroring vs single disks, different vendors, etc. Some backup systems may want you to have a large filesystem available that would not be otherwise attainable without a RAID 5/6.

Enterprise backups tend to fall along the recommendation called 3-2-1:

• 3 copies of the data, of which
• 2 are backups, and
• 1 is off-site (and preferably offline)

On my home system, I have 3-2-0 for most data and 4-3-0 for my most important virtual machines. My home system doesn’t have an off-site, but I do have two external hard drives connected to my NAS.

• All devices are backed up to the NAS for fast recovery access between 1w and 24h RPO
• The NAS backs up various parts of itself to the external hard drives every 24h
  • Data is split up by role and convenience factor - just putting stuff together like Tetris pieces, spreading out the NAS between the two drives
  • The most critical data for me to have first during a recovery is backed up to BOTH external disks
• Coincidentally, both drives happen to be from different vendors, but I didn’t initially plan it that way, the Seagate drive was a gift and the WD drive was on sale

Story time

I had one of my two backup drives fail a few months ago. Literally actually nothing of value was lost, just went down to the electronics shop and bought a bigger drive from the same vendor (preserving the one on each vendor approach). Reformatted the disk, recreated the backup job, then ran the first transfer. Pretty much not a big deal, all the data was still in 2 other places - the source itself, and the NAS primary array.

The most important thing to determine about a backup when you plan one - think about how much the data is valuable to you. That’s how much you might be willing to spend on keeping that data safe.

Running nextcloud (non docker version) and I don’t see near so many client updates - usually once every few weeks, which would be a reasonable expected pace. Server updates are less frequent.

On Windows (all of my primary devices), I just install the NC client update and skip the explorer restart, pending full reboot later. Tis the nature of literally anything that deeply integrates with Explorer. I’ve seen explorer “death” during updates from several vendors that have similar explorer plugins, not just NC. Explorer sometimes just decides to nope out even without NC updating.

Now on one device I hadn’t opened for a while, I saw NC run two updates in a row, but that was my fault for procrastinating the first one.

Here’s the desktop release history: https://github.com/nextcloud/desktop/releases
I don’t see a “one every day” within the block of time between Dec 6 and today, unless you had the release candidate builds which may have been more frequent in a few spots.

Much easier to scroll through a HTML layout formatted to my phones font than clicking on several images in sequence

While I don’t disagree can we not editorialize titles on the news community?

It being a laptop will almost undoubtedly make that endeavour more challenging. Off hand, I can’t think of a single non -proprietary internal connector from a major vendor that doesn’t already have a protocol established.

If there’s spare I/O, it’s most likely either not hooked up, was only used as a debug header, or fused off as a feature not available on that model. If it is indeed connected to something, you’d need to find documentation on that exact model of laptop since boards can sometimes vary even within the same series (such as whether a GPU is available). Chances are, whatever your find will need a specific vendor library that may or may not work on your version of the OS.

Unlike RPi and similar devices, you won’t find many consumer x86 devices that leave GPIO available and documented.

Off-hand, I think almost every LCD display I’ve encountered on x86 is plugged in to either a serial (for character displays) or higher-level protocol (for more complex displays)

Possibly important detail - what type of computer do you propose running this? Most methods that are common if you search the internet or ask here will likely apply to Raspberry Pi and it’s clones, but if you have something more esoteric it might not work.

Man this was a depressing post to read.

In the IT world, we just call that a server. The usual golden rule for backups is 3-2-1:

• 3 copies of the data total, of which
• 2 are backups (not the primary access), and
• 1 of the backups is off-site.

So, if the data is only server side, it’s just data. If the data is only client side, it’s just data. But if the data is fully replicated on both sides, now you have a backup.

There’s a related adage regarding backups: “if there’s two copies of the data, you effectively have one. If there’s only one copy of the data, you can never guarantee it’s there”. Basically, it means you should always assume one copy somewhere will fail and you will be left with n-1 copies. In your example, if your server failed or got ransomwared, you wouldn’t have a complete dataset since the local computer doesn’t have a full replica.

I recently had a a backup drive fail on me, and all I had to do was just buy a new one. No data loss, I just regenerated the backup as soon as the drive was spun up. I’ve also had to restore entire servers that have failed. Minimal data loss since the last backup, but nothing I couldn’t rebuild.

Edit: I’m not saying what your asking for is wrong or bad, I’m just saying “backup” isn’t the right word to ask about. It’ll muddy some of the answers as to what you’re really looking for.

What platform?

Another user said it - what your asking for isn’t a backup, it’s just data transfer.

It sounds like you’re looking for a storage backend that hosts all your data and can download data to the client side on the fly.

If your use case is Windows, Nextcloud Desktop may be what you looking for. I have a similar setup with the game clips folder. It detects changes and auto uploads then, while deleting less recently used data that’s properly server side. This feature might be in Mac but I haven’t tested it.

Backup wise, I capture an rsync of the nextcloud database and filesystem server-side and store it on a different chassis. That then gets backed up again to a USB drive I can grab and run.

Nextcloud also supports external storage, which the server directly connects to: https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/admin_manual/configuration_files/external_storage_configuration_gui.html