Hi all,
i have a externally hosted nextcloud (with ionos.de) that i want to connect to a local linux file server via the External Storage Plugin. Which file system would you recommend?
The options seem to be SFTP / WebDAV / SMB. It sould be fast, secure and work well with Nextcloud File Synchronisation.
Thanks!
Jasper
Can you explain your issue? You use a Managed Nextcloud from IONOS. Also you have a local server. You wrote about “External Storage Plugin”. Do you want that your Managed Nextcloud in the Internet connects to your local linux file server or the other way?
I think you want to access from your Managed Nextcloud to your local linux file server. What software do you use? ĂŤ think all of them are secure but not really fast or reliable. If you allow access from Nextcloud to your local linux file server why not migrate the needed data to the Managed Nextcloud for better performance?
SFTP is using SSH and WebDAV is using HTTPS. Both protocolls are considered secure and are therefore suitable for connections over the Internet. SMB, on the other hand, not so much. In general SMB shares, especially when hosted on Windows servers, should only be accessible locally or over a VPN connection.
In terms of performance, all three will be slower than when you use SMB locally. Obviously because the clients then access the external cloud at IONS and from there the Nextcloud server has to load the files from your local network. So if a user requests a file that is stored on the “external” storage, it has to make a detour via the IONOS server. If you are using the Desktop Client on your client machines, the performance decrease will perhaps not be directly noticeable. Nevertheless, a lot of extra traffic will be generated back and forth from your local server to the IONS server and then back again to the local clients and vice versa.
Addition:
The best solution would probably be to host the Nextcloud server locally. That way you would avoid unnecessary traffic back and forth to the IONOS server. And if you still need Nextcloud to be accessible from the Internet, you can do that also with a local server. I mean you have to open ports to your local network anyways in order for the IONOS server to be able to accesing the files from your local server. But unlike any NAS / storage appliances or Windows servers, Nextcloud is designed to be accessible directly from the Internet.
Its a bit of a complicated setup, i admit. Just to explain:
We want our current projects to be located on the IONOS Nextcloud natively and every employee (local or remote) will just sync them with the NC Client. But aditionally, we want people to be able to access our big, local server with previous projects. The speed doesnt have to be blazing fast and wont be, as our upload rate is only 30 Mbits (tough life in Germany). Thats also the reason why we are ditching a local Nextcloud Server, which we are using at the moment. 30 Mbits devided by 3 remote employees syncing data is just too slow.
So i guess the choice is between SFTP and WebDAV and if security is fine in both cases its just about performance and easy of setup i guess. I’m not doing this very profesionally as you might have guessed already (:
External storage SFTP or WebDAV have sometimes performance issues. An alternative solution is to host an additional Nextcloud on-prem. Then you can use the better external storage “Local”. The advantage of Nextcloud is that you can use any number of Nextclouds. Disadvantage is that the users must also be created there. Also the user must use two Nextcloud urls e.g. https://cloud.company.tld and https://on-prem.company.tld.