first I just wanted to say that I have a very general question for my nextcloud project, so I don’t think it is necessary to post all of the system details.
My friend wants me to create a nextcloud server with 12TB for his little company.
Nextcloud would be a great solution for him because of the permission structure.
So I have two questions regarding this project.
1. It think it should be a problem to install nextcloud over the nextcloud client on all of the workers PCs. The problem could be the synchronization process because in my understanding every of the worker should also have a hard drive capacity of 12TB on their desktop PC’s or am I wrong? A possible solution would be to select just a couple of folders for synchronization but I’m not sure if this is the desired state of my friend.
2. How would you mount the nextcloud server to the desktop PC’s. Is it possible to mount the nextcloud server like a “netdrive” instead of using the client software. As far as I understand this could be a possibility to avoid the capacity problem/synchronization of point one above. The workers would directly access the files on the server instead of working on a local copy. Maybe this isn’t the best solution because of performance issues (12TB as a netdrive - maybe problematic).
thank in advance for your help.
If you need any further information don’t hesitate to ask.
ad 1.) if every worker should have full access to every file on 12 tb-nc and all of the 12tb would be filled up with data - yes in this case every worker needs to have 12 tb-space as well. for me that would be a nonsense setting but if your friend would want this… ummm… well…
ad 2.) you could try to share it using smb/samba so that everyone could mount this as an extra volume. plus: i have heard (but didn’t try) that you could accesss nc via windows explorer as well.
ad 2.) you could try to share it using smb/samba so that everyone could mount this as an extra volume. plus: i have heard (but didn’t try) that you could accesss nc via windows explorer as well.
that would be a great idea i hope it is also possible to mount it on i OS X because that’s the OS of the workers.
Do you think the performance is good as well regarding this solution ?
i think a few additional points should be considered first:
-what goals are to be acchieved?
-size and number of the files
-concurrent file accesses (eg if it is a CAD-company and three 300GB-files are being opened (=worked on) simultaneously by ten people i am sure nc will not work satisfactorily)
-which functions of nextcloud are the most important ones?
-what’s the client os?
i think “the workers” should use the 12TB on the server “directly” with a network-filesystem specifically designed to handle workloads of that kind and not dowlnload huge amounts of data to their workstations, work on them and upload them to the server again or use webdav for that.
webdav/http is not a very efficient protocol for file-handling (esp. with huge workloads) - as much as i like nextcloud, maybe sth. like freenas (or a combination of nc and freenas) would be a more a effient and safer solution (keep in mind the 12TB backup-volume if it is really mission-critical company-data.)
there are possibilities to mount webdav as a filesystem, but for big (huge) workloads they are not very efficient.
GOOD LUCK!
We don’t share the data directory directly… however if you were to set the 12TB volume as a shared folder on the server, then add it into NC as external storage, you could indeed work with samba/CIFS or another protocol while not potentially causing corruption.
@Cloudwalker42 I’ve got a 40TB array setup in ZFS for sharing via CIFS/NFS and do a lot of the work on it via Nextcloud. This to me sounds like the best approach.
of course it should ne possible to mount smb/samba in OSx…
but see what @pete.dawgg just wrote. i wanted to add something similar as an answer. he was faster.
further: performance depends heavily on the hardware your friend is using. not only on nextcloud.
i have noticed accessing nc via win-explorer could end in an error - plus it comes with all problems of a webdav-connection (slow, etc)… but you see (and gave a perfect example) that it IS possible to set up something like the desired system using nextcloud. and if i keep in mind that one of the 3 universities in berlin is using nextcloud with 20k user …
it seems to me we’re using the wrong approach to solution design.
We already have the solution (nextcloud) and we’re desperately trying to find the use case that fits.
This sentence plus the netshare request makes me think you need a windows like fileserver (NTFS permissions), but for some reasons you don’t want to use it.
Anyway this is just a guess: in order to find the right solution (that could not be nextcloud) you should answer Pete’s questions giving us some glimps about the scenario.
