How my data survived a corrupted hard drive
… and what I’ve learned about backups and self-hosting my files.
… and what I’ve learned about backups and self-hosting my files.
Nextcloud Notes is my favorite note-taking app that allows me to sync notes across devices using my Nextcloud instance. I don’t like to limit my notes to just one computer, I need to be able to access them from anywhere, whether that’s my desktop computer, my laptop or my phone. And I choose a self-hosted Nextcloud, because then I can also choose any other file editor to edit the notes.
I’m currently “managing” (or better say storing) my photos using Nextcloud. Whenever I take photos with the camera, I copy them to a YEAR/MONTH based folder structure. Also the photos from my phone get automatically uploaded to a folder with all phone photos.
Since I use many different devices and want to access the same files from all of them, I run my “own cloud” at home with an Odroid-HC2 (a Raspberry 4 or similar device should work just as well). A 2 TB NAS hard disk (Seagate Ironwolf) is connected to the HC2, where all files are stored. Using Docker I have installed Nextcloud for files (documents, photos, etc.) as well as Gitea (code repositories). Encrypted incremental backups are done daily at night using restic and uploaded to Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage (they are quite cheap and now also have a European data center).
These are the Nextcloud apps that are activated on my Nextcloud instance:
I have just updated my Nextcloud install from Nextcloud 16 to Nextcloud 17. It’s a Docker-based installation on my Odroid HC2, which I use for a lot of self-hosted softwares. (Thanks to Docker I can forget about all things PHP!)