Our family farm is currently using a server which is hosted on site using Windows server 2011 for storing important farm information like QuickBooks backups and contracts legal documents and all kinds of stuff like that. In total it’s probably no more than 2 TB, but it’s over a long period of time.
It’s organized like any server with folders and documents in them.
Recently they realized that their server was no longer going to get updated and so they talk with someone about moving into a new system. That person quoted a pretty large sum to move to Microsoft SharePoint for all their files and their emails and other things, along with a monthly fee for keeping it all up to date.
I suggested that they find a separate service that manages hosted quickbooks, which they need, but they might find a different cheaper service to have secure document storage and screw the stupid email and Microsoft docs and other garbage that they wouldn’t use anyway.
Has anyone stored large amounts of documents in a farmos instance? If so is it easy to keep things organized? Also how does it compare security-wise to something like an FTP server with a firewall? I assume we (the farm) would use Farmier here but curious about really anyone’s opinion on other hosting strategies as well.
I’ve been dreaming about something like NextCloud but for ag, where several key applications form the core suite needed by farmers, and wouldn’t it be cool in NextCloud were in that mix I do think standard file storage is needed, and it would be neat if you could see or at least reference files back and forth from a server like nextcloud. Anyway, it’s an idea.
But thanks for the practical advice, I’m pointing him to nextcloud as a starting point - it’s much less expensive and consistent with his needs at this point.
Glad I could help! I really hope it does what he needs.
Make sure to validate/test the backup strategy early/often.
I can imagine some Frankenstein’s monster versions of this that might be possible with little/no code today…
It is possible to use an S3-compatible cloud backend for files uploaded in Drupal. (The classic application of this is when you have multiple servers for scaling/redundancy and need them all to read/write the files from/to the same place, you can use S3 as the actual file storage.) However, I think this mechanism could also serve as a crude way to tie farmOS/Drupal together with a cloud file hosting tool like Nextcloud’s “files” functionality…
One of the obvious challenges of this is that files deleted in Nextcloud would just go missing from Drupal’s perspective. There would also be no integration between farmOS’ users and the ownership of the files in Nextcloud.
Maybe it goes without saying, but just like the microcosm of farmOS itself, I suspect it would be challenging to strike the right balance between flexibility and something that’s opinionated enough to “just work” for most folks.
Personally, I wanted to like ownCloud/Nextcloud but found them a bit too clunky. Instead, I opted to patch together my own set of apps;
Keycloak - for user authentication (all the rest below use OpenID Connect against Keycloak for user logins)
InfluxDB/Grafana - for metrics/dashboards
Gitlab - for source code, build/deployment pipelines, and (meta) issue tracking
farmOS - for structured farm/garden/seed data
Seafile - for ad-hoc file storage/sharing
Matrix - for internal chat
Immich - for photo storage
Jellyfin - for music/movies/etc
That strategy obviously has its own set of challenges and quite a bit of ops overhead, but so far I think I like it better than my previous experiences with the monolithic self-hosted cloud options.
I selfhost Nextcloud with Collabora office on a Yunohost server (old laptop)
It works fine, and handles updates fine. Running troublefree for about a year now.
Seafile can also be selhosted on yunohost. It’s faster than NC.
And remember backups (the two kinds of people)
I know we can’t really consider corporate cloud ‘safe’, and a reliable backup, but when you do your own - at least have some replication off-site (fire and theft) etc.
For mine I use a replication to a separate volume (/mnt/rumen actually ) and a copy on Proton Drive. This feels… safer than just one of the two.
I do think standard file storage is needed, and it would be neat if you could see or at least reference files back and forth from a server like nextcloud. Anyway, it’s an idea.
) and a copy on Proton Drive. This feels… safer than just one of the two.