I am new to this nextcloud. And I loved the idea of self hosting. But I have some few doubts to clear.
So i am deciding to have a hdd for storage which is of 1TB. That means my storage is of hdd 1TB capacity and if I want more storage i have to increase my capacity.? And if all the files are stored in my hdd. And suppose my drive is damaged then all my storage is deleted in nextcloud ? Can’t I create a backup of nextcloud so even though my drives get damaged I can add new drive and restore all the files there so everything is normal. Is this possible?? I am planning to if it is possible to external sever for storing backups of my drive. Can you please help me if it is possible to do backups how can we do it?
Like in any circumstance if you store data on a single drive only and that drive suddenly dies, all your data probably dies too.
Nextcloud is not primarily intended to be a backup solution (imo) but it can be. If you are using the desktop sync client it will mirror all data that you configure for syncing to your local drive - that means if you want 1TB of cloud data synced up obviously you also need another 1TB drive on the client end - but the upside of this is that your data exists twice (at least) and won’t disappear if only one of the drives fail.
The other way around you may store some on just the cloud drive, and only access through web gui or mobile app “on demand” so to say. in that case you need less storage space on the client end but have a higher risk of data loss.
You can also go hybrid, keep some data only in one place and some important datas mirrored on 2 or more drives. Just be aware where your files are stored.
But like I said the primary purpose of nextcloud is more of sharing and syncronizing all sorts of data across multiple devices - backup could be seen as some sort of side effect If your primary requirement is only a “self-repairing” backup mirror of your files syncthing might be something worth looking at too. I am actually using both tools since they both are great and each have their own merits.
your questions are not direct related to nextcloud. availability and backup/restore is more a linux question.
if you are concerned about future grow of your data use a volume manager (lvm) instead of attaching hdds directly to your server. google lvm for further reading.
if you are concerned about disk failure. again use a volume manager and raid.
if you want to do backup one starting point would be:
restic can handle cloud storage as a backup target. so you write to aws s3, digitalocean spaces, backblaze, … (in combination with https://rclone.org/ your backup target get nearly infinite.) so your data are safe even if your home burns down. but 1tb cloud storage is not for free.
If your primary requirement is only a “self-repairing” backup mirror of your files 