Best practice on how to manage big Nextcloud folder - OS setup question

ℹ️ Support
1

Hey everybody,

First of all: I got a Nextcloud running for over 2 years now and people are using it more and more. I’m a really happy user!
The problem I’m facing is not directly connected to Nextcloud, but I thought other people using Nextcloud would face the same underlying problem, so I ask it here in the forum.

The problem: The data folder is saved on a single 3TB harddrive.
Soon the 3TB will be all used and I have to upgrade my setup.
I got some spare harddrives that I could use to increase the space (2x2TB and another 3TB)
How are you guys managing big data folders?
Do you use ZFS? LVM? What’s best practice?

Edit: I know I could use external storages and integrate more space this way, but I don’t want to use that. I just want one big data folder.

Best
theboda

2

No suggestions?

3

The problem is the fact that nextcloud only uses one /data-dir . But you can mount different users (subdirs) on different HDDs.

if not you can read this
How do you use multiple HDDs in Nextcloud?

4

My 2 cents
2x300gb system raid1 plenty of free space
5 cloud users 2x2Tb in lvm
1x4tb external backup

System is running raid 1

md1 : active raid1 sda2[1] sdc2[0]
145945792 blocks super 1.2 [2/2] [UU]
bitmap: 0/2 pages [0KB], 65536KB chunk

md0 : active raid1 sda1[3] sdc1[2]
49266688 blocks super 1.2 [2/2] [UU]

Nextcloud data directory is on separate disks with lvm partition ext4

(Primary volume) (volume group) (partition type)
PV VG Fmt Attr PSize PFree
/dev/sdb1 server lvm2 a-- <1,82t 0
/dev/sdd1 server lvm2 a-- <1,82t 0

(Logic volume) (volume group)
LV VG Attr LSize Pool Origin Data
% Meta% Move Log Cpy%Sync Convert
cloud server -wi-ao---- <3,64t

/dev/mapper/server-cloud 3,6T 2,9T 575G
84% /cloud

I can simply add a new disk of any size and add it to the lvm to make it grow/expand in size.

Though I need to google how but it’s really easy.

Disk sizes get bigger and bigger there are 16Tb disks out there though I wouldn’t know what to do when one of those fails. I might get 8 Tb for backup but will stick to 4Tb disks as max and use lvm

1 Like
5

For anyone wondering.
I solved it with ZFS with a RAID-Z 2.
So, 2 disks of the setup can fail and I still don’t loose any data.
The setup consists of 4TB disks and I can always add more 4TB disks as I need more space.

If I ever want to add more disks that are not 4TB I can just spin up another vdev and add it to the pool. Very satisfied with ZFS!