When looking at hard disk options I noticed that with the Seagate One Touch Hub they offer six months with Mylio so I decided to try the app, without buying that app. My first thought is that it claims to replace Google Photos and iCloud and yet the cost is similar per month. If you compare it to self-hosting solutions like Immich, PhotoPrism and NextCloud then it’s not that interesting, especially since it is for windows and mac but not Linux.
For two weeks I have been sorting through terabytes of data and it has been a journey through time. It’s easy to collect data and every so often when the laptop is full, move that data to a hard drive until that drive is full, and then onto the next, and the next, until you have a drive or two per year, for several years.
What makes this interesting is that these drives have dmg files, iso images and more.
One of the easiest things to do is to buy a hard drive, and over a period of time fill it, and then get another drive, and a third, and a fourth, and a fifth. People will go from a small drive, to a larger drive, and a larger drive after that and backup plenty of the files across three to five drives. The result is that you have terabytes of storage, and some files are “backed up” on every drive, whereas others are precariously stored on just one drive.
While playing with Nextcloud I found a serious flaw. If you add images via the command line from one directory to another, and then delete them, then their ghosts remain in the timeline. By ghosts I mean references to these files in the CMS and there is no quick way of removing them. You need to remove them individually and that’s time consuming. That’s why, when I was trying to find a solution I came across Photoprism.
Setting up a drive to be available via Samba is a relatively simple thing to do. The drawback is that you have files that are as organised as the media asset manager. It can be quite chaotic unless you have someone trained as a media asset manager, archivist, or other, to help order photos videos and more. To some degree Nextcloud is just as disorganised, initially.
I have spent more than five minutes experimenting with Nextcloud through several iterations and I have finally set things up as I want them.