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Pydio / Seafile or NextCloud ? for SFTP Backups
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Pydio / Seafile or NextCloud ? for SFTP Backups

MridulMridul Member
edited October 2017 in Requests

Dear friends,

Im planning to backup my forums ( running on vps with vestacp ) using SFTP.
I would transfer these backups to my Kimsufi. Which script do you find better, among Pydio / Seafile or NextCloud to be better suited for viewing my backups and personal storage. Any other suggestion would be most welcome.

Im looking for a simple solution to access my files and take regular backups from multiple locations ( including a few cpanel accounts as well )

Thank you for your time and inputs :)

Comments

  • frkfrk Member

    I use the ovh public cloud to store my backups. Using python you can just uploas the archives there and get them triple replicated with 100% data integrity guranteed.

    And its cheap!

    Thanked by 1Mridul
  • My two cents: neither Nextcloud nor Pydio/Seafile are backup (one-way sync) tools; they are two-way sync tools. If you really want to do backups, then these aren't the right tools. (Just to add that Pydio/Seafile are commercial products with somewhat crippled open source versions, but perhaps you don't mind.)

    Thanked by 2Mridul vimalware
  • WSSWSS Member

    rsync and mysqldump.

    Thanked by 2Mridul Wolveix
  • mfsmfs Banned, Member

    {xtra,maria,borg}backup

    WSS said: rsync and mysqldump.

    is fine too

    Thanked by 1Mridul
  • @angstrom said:
    My two cents: neither Nextcloud nor Pydio/Seafile are backup (one-way sync) tools; they are two-way sync tools. If you really want to do backups, then these aren't the right tools. (Just to add that Pydio/Seafile are commercial products with somewhat crippled open source versions, but perhaps you don't mind.)

    I understand this my friend. The backups are sent from vestacp ( It lacks a file manager in free version ) daily and transferred via SFTP to my Kimsufi.

    What i was looking fr, was to have a decent file manager with sync ( nextcloud ? ) to get those backups to my desktop and share them with other users ( admins ).

    Im looking for a friendly solution to check and sync my backups without the need to ssh into the server.

  • angstromangstrom Moderator
    edited October 2017

    @Mridul said:

    @angstrom said:
    My two cents: neither Nextcloud nor Pydio/Seafile are backup (one-way sync) tools; they are two-way sync tools. If you really want to do backups, then these aren't the right tools. (Just to add that Pydio/Seafile are commercial products with somewhat crippled open source versions, but perhaps you don't mind.)

    I understand this my friend. The backups are sent from vestacp ( It lacks a file manager in free version ) daily and transferred via SFTP to my Kimsufi.

    What i was looking fr, was to have a decent file manager with sync ( nextcloud ? ) to get those backups to my desktop and share them with other users ( admins ).

    Im looking for a friendly solution to check and sync my backups without the need to ssh into the server.

    The following scenario should work: you set up a Nextcloud (or ownCloud) server on your Kimsufi, you back up from vestacp to your Nextcloud account directory on your Kimsufi, and you use the Nextcloud client on your desktop to sync with the Nextcloud server. The only thing is that it would be best for vestacp to back up to your Nextcloud account on your Kimsufi via secure webdav (and not via sftp), because your Nextcloud account directory wouldn't be in your Kimsufi account directory. (I don't know whether vestcp can use secure webdav for backups.)

    (I have no experience with Pydio/Seafile other than what I've read.)

    An alternative to Nextcloud would be Syncthing ( https://syncthing.net/ ), which I used briefly in the past. The advantage with Syncthing is that you wouldn't need to use webdav. Syncthing is nice, but I ultimately decided in favor of Nextcloud. (Nextcloud is a centralized two-way sync tool, whereas Syncthing is a distributed two-way sync tool, but this would be a longer story.)

    Thanked by 1Mridul
  • If you don't need a web interface to access the data, I'd recommend Syncthing: it runs on just about any OS, has a web interface to set up which folders to sync with what other Syncthing instances, and doesn't mind having its files modified on the filesystem.
    Nextcloud on the other hand tends to get confused when you change its files directly, rather than through the web UI. There's a reindexing script that can fix that, but best to avoid the problem altogether if you can.

    Thanked by 2Mridul fan
  • @ucxo said: Nextcloud on the other hand tends to get confused when you change its files directly, rather than through the web UI. There's a reindexing script that can fix that, but best to avoid the problem altogether if you can.

    If I may ask, do you have a reference for this issue/problem?

    In principle, Nextcloud should be compatible with any webdav client. I sometimes add files to Nextcloud via a third-party webdav client, and I haven't experienced a problem.

    In any case, I was just trying to accommodate what @Mridul (= the OP) wanted to do. Personally, I use Nextcloud as a pure two-way sync tool and so never back up to Nextcloud. I treat backing up as a completely independent task with independent tools.

  • dyudyu Member

    I'd recommend attic if you are comfortable with cli. It gives you resumable remote backups with dedup and encryption support.

  • @angstrom said:

    @ucxo said: Nextcloud on the other hand tends to get confused when you change its files directly, rather than through the web UI. There's a reindexing script that can fix that, but best to avoid the problem altogether if you can.

    If I may ask, do you have a reference for this issue/problem?

    In principle, Nextcloud should be compatible with any webdav client. I sometimes add files to Nextcloud via a third-party webdav client, and I haven't experienced a problem.

    It's in the nextCloud docs. But if you're using a WebDAV client, then that still goes through nextCloud (Sabre library), so nextCloud indexes the files. It's not so much about web UI vs third-party DAV client, but about modifying the files on the filesystem (e.g., via rsync, sshfs, sftp, etc).

    Agreed on the recommendation for borg / attic / etc; file sync and backup are two different use cases.

    Thanked by 2angstrom ucxo
  • @seanho said: It's in the nextCloud docs. But if you're using a WebDAV client, then that still goes through nextCloud (Sabre library), so nextCloud indexes the files. It's not so much about web UI vs third-party DAV client, but about modifying the files on the filesystem (e.g., via rsync, sshfs, sftp, etc).

    Okay, but that's about mounting external storage from within Nextcloud, which is an entirely different matter (and not how I understood @ucxo's comment).

    My suggestion concerned accessing Nextcloud directly via webdav, which shouldn't be a problem whichever client is chosen.

  • @angstrom Sorry, I wasn't entirely clear. What causes problems is accessing the files on disk, circumventing NextCloud's indexer (or whatever else it does). WebDAV worked, but was horribly slow in my tests, even when using it from the machine NextCloud was running on. That's why I eventually switched to Syncthing in that particular case (syncing files between multiple different OSs and being able to add files into the sync'd directory via rsync).

    Thanked by 1angstrom
  • @dyu said:
    I'd recommend attic if you are comfortable with cli. It gives you resumable remote backups with dedup and encryption support.

    The attic developer has a strong opinion about how to maintain attic (he wants to write any non-trivial code changes himself), so attic development is practically dead.

    Borg was forked from attic by a rather knowledgeable developer (one of the maintainers of the MoinMoin wiki software) in 2015 to be able to add bugfixes and new features. I've only been using borg for a short while, but it seems to do more than any other incremental backup software I've seen, and doing it really well too.

    Thanked by 2WSS vimalware
  • @ucxo said:
    @angstrom Sorry, I wasn't entirely clear. What causes problems is accessing the files on disk, circumventing NextCloud's indexer (or whatever else it does). WebDAV worked, but was horribly slow in my tests, even when using it from the machine NextCloud was running on. That's why I eventually switched to Syncthing in that particular case (syncing files between multiple different OSs and being able to add files into the sync'd directory via rsync).

    Your point about the slowness of Nextcloud is well-taken and is in fact another reason why it's better not to use Nextcloud as backup tool. :-)

    Thanked by 1ucxo
  • WSSWSS Member

    Can we possibly get a new subject? Seeing PydioSeafiles everywhere is totally going to ruin the resale value of this thread.

  • dyudyu Member

    @ucxo said:

    @dyu said:
    I'd recommend attic if you are comfortable with cli. It gives you resumable remote backups with dedup and encryption support.

    The attic developer has a strong opinion about how to maintain attic (he wants to write any non-trivial code changes himself), so attic development is practically dead.

    Borg was forked from attic by a rather knowledgeable developer (one of the maintainers of the MoinMoin wiki software) in 2015 to be able to add bugfixes and new features. I've only been using borg for a short while, but it seems to do more than any other incremental backup software I've seen, and doing it really well too.

    I was an early attic user (even before the developer that forked came along) and still using it until now for my production database backups.

    I've actually tried to migrate to borg sometime ago and it only introduced bugs so I basically stayed with attic for stability (You'll see other devs doing the same if you scan the issue tracker).

    The same trend has happened to gogs being forked by gitea.

    I'm neutral on both camps (the original and the folks who fork). Sometimes the fork is better, or worse, depending on what criteria you're looking for.

    Thanked by 1angstrom
  • Seafile is a not an option because it needs to import files into a very complicated storage system where blocks of data are held together by a database. So it's not a file manager which you can simply point to a folder.

    Nextcloud works with regular files and folders. However, if you make changes outside of Nextcloud, you need to run an indexing process for the file/folder structure to be refreshed in the database, before being able to see the changes. It's quite simplistic and limited in file management, as it's focus is all over the place (Calendar, E-mail, Video chat, etc.) and most people's experience (particularly with large number of files) is that is kind of slow.

    Last I checked, out of the three you mentioned, Pydio was the only one that actually read the file system in real time, acting like a classic file manager. It used to be clunky and slow with unreliable sync features. The UI is now improved and a bit faster than before.

    If just web access you need, perhaps something very simple such as "tinyfilemanager" (a one-file file manager) is what you need. And for backup and sync purposes, use a dedicate tool such as Syncthing.

    There's also FileRun, which is somewhat similar to Pydio in the sense that it manages folders in real-time. It's light and fast but still provides some good extra features.

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