Hey
bloody newbie here. I wish to migrate from OneDrive to NextCloud.
is NextCloud web interface recommended as a picture and movie viewer? Do you use it daily as a web based pic and vid viewer? No local client? What are the limitations?
Hardware:
I wish to buy a HP ProLiant MicroServer G8 and install NextCloud on Ubuntu. Is this a good idea? Any hints?
rgs
It is much faster if you sync the files to your local file system. I mostly used images, and for large ones (e.g. from high-resolution DSLR cameras) for the first view it takes some time to generate the preview. And once the preview is generated, it depends on your network connection.
I didn’t try the movie viewer a lot. Some codecs are working but there is not such a large support like in some desktop players.
But you can give it a try yourself: demo.nextcloud.com or Demo instances of 9, 10, 11 and 12 now live
Before you buy hardware, I’d test it in a virtual machine and get to know it a bit better. It would be a pitty to buy hardware and in the end, you don’t like the product for some reason.
For the small home server market, you can probably find some computer magazines that tested these products. I’d use an i3 processor rather than celeron. RAM is important, 8 GB is a nice start, I would use a device where I could upgrade to at least 16 GB. There are several of these home server devices, I have only seen a intel NUC which was very nice but please check some independent tests yourself.
thanks for the demo, very helpful
I didn’t find a video player plugin and in default mode he offer me to download the *.mp4 to disk. So it means NextCloud doesn’t offer a web based video player?
Gallery normally plays my mp4 files fine, though .mov and other lesser generally supported formats it downloads.
The G8 is a nice bit of kit, but if it’s only for Nextcloud do indeed make sure you’re happy first. If you’re interested in Ubuntu you may like LXD too, allowing native containers to be created within Ubuntu and leaving your base system clean.
Previews should be pregenerated if you use the preview generator app 
I am running an HP Micro Server for over an year now, with owncloud/nextcloud. The server is mostly an backup solution with nextcloud as an aditional service that is separate from my backup software. Performance wise there are much more factors to consider than just the bare metal server… Do you plan to use nextcloud mostly in your home or remotly? For home usage, your connected devices only should use 1GB connection. If you still have some 100MB connections than for example your network can be a limiting factor. For the WebInterface perfomance: A lot comes to caching. I am running a redis server on the G8 and it can help loading big chunks of image previw much faster. But only if it does it in advance.
The best performance is if you catched all images for example in memory, but you need than a lot of memory or some sort of inteligence, that know what to cach before you look at it. Than your experience with the G8 is stunning. For viewing larger directorys of images i am using the webinterface more than the app, i dont like it that the app always trys to download all the files before viewing to the machine ( On Tablet or Smartphone) . I think there is not much of a bandwith difference in directly downloading the images or using it via web. But the way the App handles it is not as nice as an full cached webinterface with image preview. The Webinterface is much more suited for that kind of job. So if you realy want to use the Webinterface for browsing, you need to learn how much a bottleneck php for example is on your system. how to tweek the caching, fitting to your needs and so on. The G8 is only one piece in the puzzle. I never looked back to buy it, because it is realy great bang for the bug, but consider other factors as - caching RAM, your network situation (internal and external), different php version, image caching and so on. There are many task to solve. You can have an working enviroment with all the installation defaults. The Webinterface will be usable but probably not as a sharp tool as it could be.
Are you a Nextcloud newbie or overall an Linux(admin) newbie?
For the most part you will not need that big insight view, because the guys here did a greate job making the experience as simple as it could get, to run your own server. But you realy should try to understand every step in the Nextcloud Administration Manuel https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/12/admin_manual/. Go to the tuning section and ask yourself why they do certain things, google your questions that will help you to get a better picture. In the end nextcloud is just a software that is running on top of a lot of other things.
tl:tr you get a default usable webinterface on the G8 but if you want to get to town you need to be willing to spend time resachring and digin in your enviroment for bottlenecks.
Hope i could help a bit, i am only an advanced noob myself
I can’t get Gallery working with an uploaded *.mp4. I am able to upload *.mp4 in demo instances, but don’t see the *.mp4
thanks for pointing me to
The LXD container hypervisor
10x the density of ESX, 25% faster, zero latency
Move your Linux VMs straight to containers, easily, without modifying the apps or administration processes. Canonical’s LXD is a pure-container hypervisor that runs unmodified Linux guest operating systems with VM-style operations at incredible speed and density.
But containers are stateless? How do I upload all pictures and videos to it and don’t loose it when container restarts?
thanks for the hint with Redis. I already read the docs about “Configuring Memory Caching”. What backup solution do you use?
I am Linux and Nextcloud newbie. But I worked on my job several years Solaris and AIX.
As a backup tool i use multiple mechanism. I will breakdown my setup:
HP MicroServer as Backup Server with RAID 1 BTRFS.
Borgbackup https://github.com/borgbackup/borg
Database Dump’s on all Servers with Database’s
Provisioning of all Servers with Ansible.
Because i have my complete Setup installed over Ansible, i dont care on an operating Level Backup. I only backup data and Database’s ( non stateless data) all other things are described over Ansible.
Borgbackup can backup localy or over ssh. For my local Nextcloud Installation, i backup my oc_data to another btrfs volume with borgbackup. Borgbackup handels encryption, deduplication, and compression, and it will prune my backup’s so i have a daily backup on last 7 days, 4 backups of last month and so on. After the backup i will make snapshots of the backup partion with btrfs… The Backup server cant read his own backups cause security.(only with a key that i save seperatily) Every Client borgbackup makes his own backup and prune his own backups. ( Every client has its own key). I do this double backup because, only that way, my backup cant be destroyd from the client( if there is an compromised client) because the client need to prune the backup for security. The server cant prune because if it could it could read my backups from all my other servers. If an attacker get’s into my backup server it would be game over so i have only encrypted backup that can be accesd by the client ( or my seprate secret not on backup server)
a client can acces his backup directory but not the “btrfs backed up directory”.
Sry for maybe not be that clear about it maybe a picture drawn by me would be more understandable…
if you only have one server it dont need to be that complicated… there is not that problem.
Anyway borgbackup is a great tool but it is a relativ new one. Borgbackup is a fork of the 6 year old program attic. Was not that knowen but its a great tool. For Database i do regular DB dumps and sync that with borgbackup to the Server.
Not all containers are the same 
LXD is stateful - it’s like a VMware setup but without the virtualization overhead.
I’ll see what I did with my instance later. Could be codecs.
Edit: might be your browser, I can play mp4 videos on the demo servers perfectly fine.
I now uploaded a picture of me and see it in overview
I did also upload a random Mp4 movie and don’t see it in overview
(can’t upload a second screenshot, because I am new user, sorry)
I tested with Safari and Firefox on macOS
I use NC 12
Oh you’re in gallery view… if you switch back to file view using the file icon along the top or the grey menu-looking icon on the right it’ll put you back in file view.
@oparoz are videos supposed to show up in the gallery app? Do they do so in Gallery+ (if it’s available for 12)?
very nice video player.
But in file view no preview? Is this correct? I have thousands of small MP4 and wish to see preview before play.
Ping @rullzer too as perhaps something can be configured, or implemented, on the preview app to accommodate video thumbnails?
It is possible to have preview generation working in the background on a schedule. It speeds up the gallery quite significantly and makes it quite good to use as a picture viewing tool. It is not the fastest thing in the world, it takes a few seconds to navigate through each folder for me. It might be my servers fault, it is still on php5.6, a php7 enabled server should be faster. Of course local will be faster, but it works very well if you ask me.
