I run a full media server, as well do a few friends. Now we had the idea to share our media libraries. In a first quick attempt we, mounted each other’s library folder via an smb share and imported those in jellyfin (all servers connected by VPN) Works quite well, but is kind of cumbersome the more people get in. I had the following idea: distributed storage, not as in redundancy, but more like mergerfs. Each “node” allocates a certain amount of storage, say node A, B and C provide 1TB each, these get fused into a singe mount that shows up as 3TB volume. If one node goes offline, the volume will only be 2TB and all files on the offline node will of course be unavailable.
Did a bit of research and found stuff like ceph,.glusterfs or seeweedfs, all of which I guess have a lot more functionality and thus are quite complicated and a little over my head. Do you do something like that or have any good ideas how to do that easily?
Give it a try. You don’t have to do the digital equivalent of living off the grid. I self-host a bunch of stuff but I still use a bunch of Google services, because it makes more sense for me.
I personally used Plex for a long time, but I eventually gave it up after having to reset my library one too many times. That means all my watched/unwatched data gets wiped, as well as any custom covers I’ve set. It also never really played well with Chromecast. I’ve been using Jellyfin for a while and it’s less polished, but it’s good enough for me.