Categories

Each post will be categorised under one of the catgories

#MyTechXperiments – Related to all the Tech Experiments I have done

#SelfHostedExperiments – Related to my experiments in my selfhosted setup

#HowTo – Some Tricks I have figured out when experimenting (Tutorials)

#SliceOfLife – Excerpt from my own life

#Opinions – Opinions on some topic (Tech/Books/Life)

Tags

Each tag relates to a related post in the blog.

#Hugo #WriteAs #PersonalWebsite #Blog #Nextcloud #Ecosystem #Files #Photos #Lessons4Life #Photoprism #Seafile #Videos #Minetest #Game

Timestamps

Click on a timestamp to jump right in to a specific timeframe.

#June2021

So, What Happened?

I was trying to move photos from Nextcloud to Photoprism (Docker). Photoprism has a feature where I can add a WebDav folder and it will sync the photos automatically. That’s great! Because I don’t need to download the photos manually and then upload it to Photoprism. I was seriously liking the whole process and it made my life a bit simpler while setting up these services. After the sync, I deleted the WebDav folder from Nextcloud (of which the photos were synced) like a good boy since the photos were already copied and started organising the photos in Photoprism.

It was genuinely a good productive day. Things had gone as per the plan and it couldn’t have been any better. And I called it a day and had a very sound sleep.

The next day, to my surprise, the photos that I carefully collected over the years were lost (Mysteriously). There was nothing more terrifying at that moment when I saw my gallery folder empty!!

Yeah, But How?

Apparently, Photoprism and Nextcloud folder was on sync. That means, whenever the folder in Nextcloud changes, Photoprism also does that change in its folder and its consequent database.

After the sync, Like I deleted the WebDav folder from Nextcloud (of which the photos were synced) like a good boy and started organising the photos in Photoprism.

This is where I did a blunder and everything was gone! Since Photoprism saw no photos in the Nextcloud folder, it went ahead and deleted everything from its folder. Simple!

And, How did you recover them?

So, Nextcloud has a built in trash feature which I had enabled while I had installed Nextcloud in my server. After the migration, I had deleted the Nextcloud folder in the Nextcloud web interface which will move the folder from files to files_trash.

It took me a while to get there since web_ui in Nextcloud was unresponsive and amidst all this confusion, I forgot that there was even a files_trash folder in the Nextcloud setup. I should have removed the Nextcloud <–> Photoprism sync first before deleting one of the folders.

Then a quick copy and import recovered all the photos and videos. However then I carefully deleted my Nextcloud without affecting any other components in the setup. Phew! it was a really long morning. A Lesson for Life.

Categorized under #Note

Tags : #Lessons4Life #Nextcloud #PhotoPrism #Seafile #Photos #Videos

Timestamp : #June2021

“The efforts that I’m putting into self hosting and maintaining xyz service on my RaspberryPi really worth it? Or should I move to some other service or create an account in somebody else’s self hosted setup?”

After this self-introspection, it occurred to me that there are a few changes I had to make in my self hosted setup, and this is a result of a lot of brainstorming related to it.

Why not Nextcloud?

Yes exactly, Why not Nextcloud? It’s amazing. It has a lot of add ons, plugins, custom css and many more. Just make sure you install it properly and you don’t need to worry about installing another service for news/podcasts/calendar/contacts and much more.

Yes, I get that. That’s what anyone would tell. But the flipside of the coin is that, you are using one service to be a base for every other type of service you use. So even when one of the service starts being janky, you are deemed to stay with it. Since I use a RaspberryPi to self host most of my services, Nextcloud would take up almost all the memory not to leave any space for any other service I would like to deploy.

I used nextcloud as a drop-in replacement for Google drive and Google photos all in one. Eventually I started to make it as my ecosystem keeping my calendar and contacts in sync with it. It’s a really good service but not good enough to be self hosted on a raspberry pi and low-memory chips.

What next?

I’m planning to move to a diversified ecosystem than putting all my eggs in one basket. I’ll focus on services that does one thing and does it well. (I briefly spoke about it in this toot) And have different services to host files (?seafile) and host photos/videos (?photoprism). So that when they become unusable for my use-case, they can be easily replaced. Hopefully when I upgrade my setup to use machines with better memory, maybe I’ll come back to Nextcloud. Until then, Bye Nextcloud :(

Categorized Under #MyTechXperiments

Tags : #nextcloud #ecosystem #files #photos #selfhosted

Timestamp : #June2021