Hi. Sorry for the vague title. Nowadays I’m using multiple computers and get to need files and such from other machines pretty often. My music and photos library has also increased and it’s getting much harder to maintain with it being scattered across many machines. Basically I’m trying to have a photo library and plain files(documents, music, etc) shared across computers.

For plain files I’m thinking nfs+samba would be the best approach, but there are problems. They have speed issues, but as I can’t afford large space for all my machines I can’t keep a full rsync’d local copies everywhere too.

The photos are my bigger concern, as I’m looking for a tagging feature. A plain directory structure would be easy to sync but those tags would differ by programs… desktop programs like digikam or xnview(sadly proprietary) would work well if I didn’t need syncing, but I’m not sure if they’d work reliably with all their configs/files stored over nfs. Plus, these programs would have incompatibilities by platform and not work at all on android.

Web based solutions like Immich or NextCloud Photos appear to be pretty famous nowadays, but I’m not sure about them as well. They seem to be overkill for my purpose, and those mostly tend to be very new & i’m not too sure about their future, as they store tags and such on their own formats.

Edit: Oops, forgot to say. I have multiple servers right now, one offsite running FreeBSD, another running Devuan, and one at home running FreeBSD.

I’d love to hear how others are maintaining their system. Thanks for reading.

  • Catsrules@lemmy.ml
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    3 months ago

    Maybe I have just had back luck but syncing my files across all of my devices has always burned me at some point. No matter what software I have used I have overwritten something by accident or I try and delete something and it doesnt get deleted on all device. Or get a bunch of conflicting files and now i need to figure out what file I want etc…

    I do use some syncing but it is mostly between only two devices. Often times it is only a 1 way sync. For example photos on my phone get synced to my NAS automatically.

    For me keeping all of my files in one place is the way to go. I just have everything on a NAS. (TrueNAS) All of my devices connect to that and i just edit them directly over the network.

    I have a VPN for remote access.