Stash: Great for organizing, but worried about storage size/location privacy

General Discussions
1

Hello! New to stash and I have a question about if I’m coming to it with the right goals

Up till now I’ve been using Google Drive as my main storage method for my collection. While it’s been great for storage (pretty cheap for additional space), and not having my collection on my PC, it is very clunky for actually organizing, sorting, or doing anything close to tagging uploads.

I thought Stash might help me with the sorting/tagging problem, and while it absolutely is great for that, I’m not sure if it’s what I’m quite looking for. I don’t want to keep my collection on my PC for space & privacy concerns, but since I am so new to this, I don’t know if Stash has any sort of cloud storage capacity, or if that is even the right term for what I’m looking for.

If Stash is sadly not what I’m looking for, are there alternatives that are the best of both worlds? Sorry if this is not the right place to ask this sort of thing, but I am wholly inexperienced with anything like Stash. This is my first foray into private networks, github stuff, etc.

2

Stash itself doesn’t connect to any cloud storage directly. But there are tools to mimic it.

Rclone is a tool for syncing with tons of different cloud storage providers. And it also supports mounting the cloud as if it is the local filesystem: rclone mount

There are disadvantages to mounting since it will use bandwidth and/or API calls for scan and generate tasks. Every cloud storage has different limits and costs.

Rclone supports Google drive. Also, since you mention privacy, rclone supports encryption for too.

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3

Thanks! Have you used this to sync with stash personally?

I apologize if this is a big/stupid ask, but there are a lot of terms you used that I see everywhere, and I have no real idea what they imply or how they work. Again I am super super SUPER new to all of this, so what do terms like mounting, APIs, and encryption really mean?

Edit: Or if someone can point me towards a web development for dummies start course that’d be great too

4

Stash supports any mounted volume that your operating system can access. So while Stash can’t connect to external cloud providers directly, if you can attach your cloud storage as a mounted volume on your operating system Stash will be able to access it. As mentioned by @damontecres rclone is the most popular and widely used option for that.

If you are new to all of this, rclone has extensive documentation and there are many written and even more video guides for it.

As far as Stash, once you have mounted volume, you can add it to Stash library as any local drive by typing in the volume letter.

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5

rclone mounts are generally quite stable, you will encounter performance issues just because it’s over the network, but giving it a very healthy vfs cache will help alleviate it. making your own client id will also be a huge performance boost.

Once you get it mounted on your system, stash won’t know or care about the difference. Just make sure your database is local, if it is mounted/remote it will break.

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very healthy vfs cache

What is a vfs cache, and what makes it healthy? I’ll probably have a lot more questions too

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I am a ways into trying to make a mount work, I have the remote configured, but I’m stuck with figuring out how to actually build the mount

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basically it mean when you play a file ( that lives on the cloud, rclone will download this file (or part of it) to your machine 1st, make playback, seeking smoother,…