Playing with Nextcloud Ambitiously and Crashing Immich

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Last night I decided to play with Nextcloud more ambitiously. I set up four synchronisations, one for documents, one for photos, one for downloads and one for desktop. I did it this way because if I went to my root user account and backed everything up I would backup files that are not critical.

It makes sense to backup the documents, downloads and desktop folders because that's where the most useful things are. In theory I should backup photos too, and I did set that with one Pi but not the other. The reason is simple. Photos are already backed up by Immich, PhotoPrism and Kdrive, so to backup that folder makes little sense, especially since photos are usually taken with the phone, so that's where the backup should take place.

## Twin Experiment with Pi4 and Pi5

On the topic of Immich I do have Immich and Nextcloud running on a Pi4 and on a Pi5. The Pi4 has either crashed, or slowed down to a crawl due to overheating several times, wheras the Pi5 seems to be coping with my backing up of files from the laptop I am using to Nextcloud.

My goal of running the Pi4 with Immich and Nextcloud was mainly to see if Immich worked faster than Photoprism but so far that is not the case. Immich appears to be crashing or slowing down the Pi4 to a crawl consistently. Photoprism on the Pi5 is stable but slow. For weeks, or even months I have been waiting for Photoprism to finish indexing all of the photos that are on that system.

## New Files Show Up on Immich

On the positive side at least new files that are uploaded to Immich show up, so even if it takes a while for the back catalogue to be archived the current images and videos do show up and are playable, in the brief windows when the system has not crashed. I am of the impression that these crashes are due to using the desktop version on a Pi4, rather than because of Nextcloud and Immich.

## External Volume Not Showing Up on Nextcloud

I used the plugin to allow for external volumes to be used from within Nextcloud but they are not visible when using the desktop sync tool. I will setup a 1tb SD card to run Nextcloud from the Pi4 with a server version of Raspbian or Ubuntu and see how well that works. The desktop is nice to have, but not essential, especially if it is the source of crashes.

## Replacing the Wired Time Machine Backup

I am currently using two old drives as Time Machine backups. They need to be plugged in either every day, or on alternative days to backup the system. The issue is that when they are plugged in I cannot move the machine until I eject the disks. I use Nextcloud to sync files that change regularly. Time Machine then becomes a secondary backup tool.

## And Finally

For two or three months I have been playing with backing up photos and videos from the phone to photoprism and Kdrive and those systems work well. What I like about photoprism is that it backs up in the evening when I am sleeping. Kdrive backs up almost as soon as I take photos. Kdrive also has the advantage of allowing me to retrieve photos with ease. they're organised by year and month so moving them around is very easy.

With Nextcloud backing up document files, desktop files and downloads I am synching/backing up files constantly.