I love the look and idea of Kavita, but I wish it was written in something like node.js instead of .net. It requires a handful of shared libraries on non-windows platforms, and I can rarely get it to work.
It’s not as slick looking but take a look at Ubooquity. I have it on my Linux server and haven’t had any issues. Granted I mostly use it for sharing ebook files, not reading them on the server itself so it might not be what you’re looking for
Edit the time zone and volume paths as needed. You can just make a new volume for config and it will fill it with settings stuff, and then point the data volume to the folder with your ebooks.
The ebooks themselves need to be sorted a little differently depending on if they are PDF’s, ePub, or comics, but it isn’t to hard once you get the hang of it. Basically ePub likes to be in a subfolder and PDF likes to be in the root folder for some reason, otherwise it puts the PDF’s in a collection named after the subfolder.
Overall, I’ve been really happy with Kavita and think it has a lot of potential, especially as an ebook extension of Plex since the layout is nearly identical.
For the money you’ll spend on drives, you may be able to pay for a year of space at somewhere like www.storj.io, and use something like Duplicati to backup to them.
Because even with a shiny new NAS, you’ll still need backup for it when it crashes, something is accidentally deleted, a drive hiccups and loses data, etc.
If you already have some stuff sitting around, spin up an UnRAID/TrueNAS, but still have a backup solution.
I might use some paid remote storage for an off site backup but i need something local as 0.6Mbps/s is about the best upload i can get without shilling out for starlink.
Your biggest bang for buck is with cheap second hand drives, keep a spare on hand to rebuild the array / volume when one dies. You should be aware that the number of drives in the array directly affects the amount of usable space, 2 drives 50% of total available (a direct mirror, to compensate for the loss of one drive), 3 drives you get 66%, 5 gets you 80%. Say you get 6 4Tb drives, keep one as a spare and the remaining 5 will give you 16Tb usable (with one lost to parity so you can survive one disk failure). You then immediately want to save for a 16 Tb external drive for offline, preferably offsite backup (RAID is not Backup!). As others have wisely said, anything can be used to host, but aim at the most power efficient. If necessary get a PCI card for more SATA or SAS ports. Identify high value, small files, documents, current work, personal photos, source code and so forth and arrange for cloud backup, preferably with local encryption so you needn’t trust the cloud provider, preferably in at least two places (so one can go tits up or enshittify without bothering you). You’d be surprised what fits into a free 10Gb account if you triage well.
It might not be applicable to you but in many cases single board computers are used where there is minimal changes in files in day to day basis. For example when used for displaying stuff. For such cases, it is useful to know that after installing all the required stuff, the SD card can be turned into read only mode. This prolongs its life exponentially. Temporary files can still be generated in the RAM and if needed, you can push them to an external storage/FTP through a cron job or something. I have built a digital display with weather/photos/news where beyond the initial install, everything is pulled from the internet. I’m working towards implementing what I’ve suggested above.
That would not be ideal, as I want to keep most logs of the system, and I don’t have a syslog server and even if I had one I wouldn’t be able to get everything I need… But it is a quite good idea for other usecase and I might do that with my future projects that doesn’t need a rw filesystem!
I love that idea, and I’d love to implement that. But I honestly can never figure out how people are working with services that enables the user to change settings (for example, to set their location to get their local weather) while still maintaining a read-only system.
You keep the user-changeable files on a separate filesystem. Whether that’s just a separate partition, or an external disk. Keep the system itself read only, and write-heavy directories like logs and caches in RAM.
I am still figuring it out since it is my hobby and I’m unable to devote much time to it. But I think it will be something like Ubuntu live disks which enabled you to try Ubuntu by running it from a DVD. You could run anything like web server, save files, settings etc. Only they would not persist after a reboot since every thing was saved in RAM. Only here it’ll be a write locked SD card instead of a DVD.
I’m also sure there must be a name for it and step by step tutorial somewhere. If only Google was not so bad these days…
This looks promising, but unfortunately the advertised just replace github.com with some alternative host doesn’t work. I can’t check the issues, wiki, etc, all pages give me error (except main repo url), eg:
I recommend going with regular backups and maybe something like docker. Then you just have to restore the config volumes and all the accounts should still be there.
If nextcloud is overkill, then just serve the file with Apache (with directory listing turned on) and put it behind oauth2-proxy. It’s as simple as it can get.
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