Current Challenges with using Umbrel - my experience thus far

General Discussions
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I installed umbrel on my mini-pc to try and see how well it works on my home network around June 2024.

Pros:

  • I like Umbrel’s UI. It does make it easy for me to find apps and install them. It also nice to see the app catalog being updated regularly
  • Dockerized apps do make it easier to maintain and use the correct versions of not just the main applications but also the applications they depend on (like database, etc.) as opposed to having to manage everything

Cons:

  • my 8GB of mini-PC memory is probably not much because that capacity fills up fast. This can be mitigated by stopping some apps manually.
  • It is hard to modify the system in a permanent way when I have a customized home network with multiple device configuration that deviates from a typical use case of a single umbrel device.

Here an example of a challenge and workaround I am doing as a result:

  • I have a 20TB NAS on my local network which I want to utilize as the main storage for Nextcloud data, Immich data source, and other apps as well. This however is not very easy to do so using Umbrel as it is.
    This is an example for Nextcloud and these were my steps to try to accomplish what I wanted:
  1. install samba, cifs, and then mount my NAS onto the Umbrel’s mini-PC and create an fstab to make this permanent (but not sure how permanent as I don’t know if these get reset during Umbrel’s major update)
  2. determine where and modify the nextcloud docker config file to point the external mount to this new nas mount location. (i am also not sure how permanent this is or if that path will reset if nextcloud docker gets updated)
  3. copy any existing data from the default location to the new location.

The above three steps do seem to have some success in updating the local path of nextcloud data to the NAS. However, I noticed that if a major update occurs for umbrel then more often than not I have to repeat the above steps.

This similar approach needs to be taken for other apps like Immich, etc.

Now given that I have to ssh into umbrel to do all these tasks, I feel that Ive lost my initial ease of use feeling for umbrel. I hope umbrel in the future can be designed to accommodate situations like mine without me having to find workaround and using the command line.

Has anyone else done or experienced something similar?

Thank you.