Expanding diskspace for apps after installation - through USB or external Harddisk

Thanks for the great work on Yunohost!

I’ve recently installed my own server on a Raspberry Pi 3 B, and installed the Nextcloud app on it among others. Now if I am going to put a lot of files on this Nextcloud, especially video’s, then the 32GB memory on the SD card in the RPi will be full pretty quickly. Therefore, I would like to later be able to expand the memory of my server.

In that case I am expecting the following to work: if I stick a USB stick of like 32Gb or 64Gb or a 2Tb hard disk into one of the USB ports of the RPi, then I will be able to story many more files on my Nextcloud.

Is the above assumption correct, and if not. Would it be possible to make this wish a reality within Yunohost?

Short answer is : yes

Long answer is : yes, but that depends on what exactly you want to achieve - and you will have to tweak a few things manually.

Let’s stick with the use case of “store many many more file on Nextcloud” which is fine and relatively easy I think. There is some documentation about this here :
https://yunohost.org/#/external_storage and https://yunohost.org/#/app_nextcloud_fr (second one only in french eh).

But basically once you added and configurer the drive, you should be able to add a “Local Storage” from Nextcloud’s admin interface ? Then you’ll have an additional folder in Nextcloud, (e.g. ‘MyDrive’) and everything you put into it shall be on your drive.

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Hello,
If you’re using a Rasp Pi, I would recommend having only the boot partition on the SD card and everything else on a USB HDD.
SD cards are not reliable enough to store any data on the long run (i.e. a few monthes in the case of a data server).
It’s a little slower but I had too many issues with dead SD cards. Moreover these issues can be veeeeeery tricky to find.
When I first start to experiment on selfhosting with my Pi, I killed 3 SD cards in around 1,5 year (thanskfully, data was already on an external drive). I moved everything to the external HD more than a year ago and I didn’t have any issue since then.

This will work, but be aware of some restrictions on nextcloud in this case: The data will be refreshed on the Nextcloud database only if you visit the folder within the web pages. This may be an issue if you plan to use the sync client and not to connect to the Nextcloud web pages.

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Hi ! Would you recommend a tutorial for that ?

Hello,
Sorry, no, but I think you can find some pretty easily on the net.
Also, I think I saw on this forum that the RaspPi 3 can now boot directly from an hard disk, which would be better!

Thank you all for your responses! I now realise that having stuff on the SD card might not be a very reliable solution if it is not very stable. Also it would be good to have a certain backup process in place, perhaps to another USB and/or remote location over the network.

In any case, we need to change the installation manual to reflect this knowledge for the installation of Yunohost on the Raspberry Pi 3. This opens up the process of researching and discussing what a simple to install yet longterm stable installation on Raspberry Pi 3 looks like, including external devices and/or automated backup devices and procedures.

I think this needs a new topic. What do you think?
Cheers!

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Yes, please… A tutorial on this would be great

It turns out there is ‘a new topic’ (as in, newer than this one, running parallel), not with a howto, but with a post where @Vinz points to the Raspberry Pi forum with a tutorial on expanding diskspace.