It started well ahead of actual BF, but Best Buy has 18TB Easystore drives for $200.

If you’re happy with those services … maybe you shouldn’t?

I self-host because I prefer to house my data locally when possible. It’s easier for backups and I’m not subject to the whims and financial decisions made by a company about whether their service will remain available, what it will cost, what functions it will offer. The tradeoff is work on my part, but I enjoy tinkering and learning.

In my case, I self-host a NextCloud instance for remote access to my docs, a Calibre Web server for eBooks (and to share those with a few trusted friends), a Vaultwarden instance because I’d prefer my vaults not be stored by a company whose servers are likely a major target for bad actors and that could change its TOS or offerings in the future.

I installed it because I was curious, and still learning some things about Docker.

I pretty quickly used it to install portrainer, and I’ve since managed everything from there.

The file manager is moderately handy, but nothing I couldn’t do either with the command line or another filemanager tool I’d install through Docker itself.

I still have it set up because I have no need to change it, but I wouldn’t use it if I were doing my setup from scratch.

I’m kind of curious about Cosmos as what seems like a more comprehensive alternative, but I’m pretty happy with how I have some of its other functions (like reverse proxy) set up now, so if I try it, it’ll probably just be to tinker.

Thanks for the heads up on this project. It looks like it might work very well for some people who basically want a web app as a view right into a filestystem for dealing with folders.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t really meet the needs I’m laying out. The use case I’m describing is still one where the web app abstracts away the file system and uses albums. It just lays out a (smart, I think) way of recognizing and interpreting the organization in a pre-existing library, like one created from a Google Photos takeout, when bringing photos into its own system – accounting for duplicates in albums without doubling them up on disks.

Direct editing of EXIF is handy. Memories does that too, and it’s part of why it’s what I’m using. But my ideal situation would be one where the app only writes metadata changes to its own database initially, but then (optionally) applies it to EXIF when exporting/downloading files without touching the original files. And it would also give the user an option to apply metadata to EXIF for the original files, but only after first prompting with warnings.

It seems your design goals are pretty different than any of that – which isn’t a criticism, as I’m sure it works well for the way a lot of people like to work (just not me).

Syncthing would work well for just syncing.

So would Seafile, for a more Google Drive-like experience.

So would NextCloud, for more of an extensible Google Drive+Apps experience that you can customize to your needs.