How to add "External Storage" like an SMB Share?

[ericwaetke]

This is something I’ve got in my current Nextcloud Setup, and I don’t really want to change that. I’ve got my main nas share, which I’d loke to access via OpenCloud to share stuff or open documents on my phone.

In Nextcloud there is the App External Storage where that is configurable. I haven’t found something similar in the settings or docs.

I did see this discussion, indicating that this indeed is possible, but I don’t quite understand how to. https://github.com/orgs/opencloud-eu/discussions/649

Would love some pointers (or maybe even more extensive docs) :)

[Llamrei80]

i'd like that too, but from what i read it's not planned.

[ericwaetke]

That’d be a bummer …

[SirDigitalKnight]

As soon as they have an Android app, allow data to be stored on external storge, and get a Memories (like Nextcloud has) for photos I will move to it! For a year now I have been looking for something that will let me install on Proxmox and save photos to external drives but NOTHING has worked. Tried Immich, Nextcloud Memories and neither will let me set it up so that my photos that autosync go to an attached drive to my Proxmox NUC box. If I was better at programming I would write my own code. :-(

[vhsdream]

Hey @SirDigitalKnight I've made a Proxmox Helper Script that installs Immich in a Proxmox LXC (without Docker), and as long as you are familiar with how to configure the correct permissions for mounted shares in an LXC it's possible to use Immich as described.

I'm currently developing a similar script for OpenCloud, and pretty much the last thing on my checklist is tackling external storage support (currently I've figured out OpenID with Authelia & PocketID, Collabora integration, CalDAV/CardDav with Radicale, external app support, email notifications, Tika integration).

I hope that by testing a few environment variables related to the 'storage-system' and 'storage-users' services in OpenCloud I might be able to figure out a way to get storage on a NAS share via SMB working.

[SirDigitalKnight]

Yesterday I was actually successful in getting Immich installed on a 750GB USB attached drive to my Proxmox Intel NUC using a USB thumb drive with Debian ISO on it and the 750GB drive completely blank. I set up a VM with specs Immich mentions as ideal (6GB ram, 4 cores) and changed the boot order to usb1 to install Debian barebones on the 750GB drive. After Debian was installed I changed the VM to boot from usb0. From there I installed Docker and Docker Compose using these instuctions: https://reintech.io/blog/setting-up-docker-docker-compose-debian-12 . After that was all up and running I then use the script on Immich page that is listed as [Experimental] and it actually installed Immich just fine. Took awhile to install but I now have 685.7 GB of available space for photos and videos from my phone. New to all this so I am sure there are other ways to do this but I had exhausted all other options as there really is not much documented online on how to use an external drive for storage of all your photos and videos in a Proxmox environment. One other note I should add: I also set a static IP for VM. As root: nano /etc/network/interfaces

The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
static network
auto ens18
iface ens18 inet static
address 192.168.1.###
netmask 255.255.255.0
network 192.168.1.1
broadcast 192.168.1.255
gateway 192.168.1.1

[dragotin]

As noted, external storage nor SMB is currently not on the roadmap, which you can consult here: Roadmap

In the future we would probably rather make such "external storages" available as additionally configured spaces, but that needs more investigation, documentation and test at the current point of time.

[tbsbdr]

yes, thanks @dragotin
That is something we'd love to have but implementing SMB as external storage needs quite some research and testing. Nothing we could do over night in a proper, solid way. This would touch the "heart" of OpenCloud so we would need to be careful, dataloss would be an absolute no-go. with that in mind I hope we can deliver this option someday, but currently its not on the roadmap.

[suse-coder]

That would be awesome. We also miss to have S3 and SMB from external to be mounted as space or similar into opencloud

[CatRass]

This is definitely something I'd love to see. It's better to connect via an SMB share than by adding a mount through Docker in my opinion, and I'd prefer to stay away from OwnCloud, that does have this feature.

[micbar]

@CatRass I am still wondering what your exact use case is?

Where do you need SMB for?

There are so many different options to make openCloud folders available in Client machines.

If that is what you need. Maybe i misunderstand your use case.

That may have changed, but I've stuck with what I originally set up. That being said, does OwnCloud support external storage mounted via NFS?

NFS v4.2 works when extended attributes are supported. I heard that some NAS providers do not fully support the NFS 4.2 spec.

[ericwaetke]

My comment at least was not about mounting Opencloud folders as SMB shares.

I already have smb shares on my NAS, which I want to access through Opencloud.

If that is by using SMB or NFS I frankly don't really care. Earlier in the discussion someone said that neither external storage nor SMB support are on the roadmap.

Has that now changed? Can I add a NFS share as external storage?

[micbar]

You can put the primary storage on NFS.

External "additional" storage is not available.

[ericwaetke]

You can put the primary storage on NFS.

Would this respect existing folder structure?

A problem I've had with Nextcloud in the past was, that every file and every directory was indexed. Thus, changing folder content and adding files via the share in the local network didn't show up in Nextcloud. Only changes made in Nextcloud actually updated the listed content

[micbar]

I have the feeling that you did not read https://docs.opencloud.eu/docs/admin/configuration/storage/storage-posix

😄

[lalishansh]

Hello guys hear me out.

What if you can mount folders as spaces, where admin is by default part of.

You can spicify these shared folders via config.

Where would this help, if you have NAS folder for some project, mounted drive, they automatically appear to your space.

Let's say you have build machine or old data drives, you mounts these folders and suddenly appear/visible to involved people.

For enterprise this can be bud directories, project specific assets folders etc. Connected/visible to external services.

For home users they can mount external drives, nas locations etc.

Thanks

[ptC7H12]

That would be awesome! I've some existing folders filled with data - if I could mount them to OC (like in Nextcloud) that would be awesome and I still could use these files for other applications