Use a Linode Block Storage Volume for your XenForo attachments

[Sim]

Sim submitted a new resource:

Use a Linode Block Storage Volume for your XenForo attachments - How to move your attachments directory to a resizeable block storage volume on Linode

Linode’s Block Storage service allows you to attach additional storage Volumes to your Linode. A single Volume can range from 10 GiB to 10,000 GiB in size and costs $0.10/GiB per month.

If you run your XenForo forum on a Linode server and have a large number of attachments - it is now possible to move those attachment files to a resizeable block storage volume which means that you won't need to pay for a larger Linode just to get extra space.

Until they released Block Storage Volumes, I...

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[radu81]

Very useful guide, I will surely use it when I will update to XF 2.1, I'm still on 1.5

Just one question, is it also possible to use the block storage to store the Media Gallery files? Thank you

 

[Sim]

My main sites are still running on XF 1.5 !! This guide works on all versions.

Media Gallery files are stored in the same place that attachments are, so yes it is possible to use block storage.

Indeed, this is exactly the reason I moved to using Linode Block Storage - we have nearly 400,000 photos in our gallery on ZooChat so I needed a 200GB volume to store them all (plus the forum attachments).

 

[Kirby]

Nice guide. Instead of directly mounting the block volume to attachments it could also be mounted to a generic mount point and have a subdirectory bind mounted to attachments.

This way one block volume could also be used for storing other data.

 

[Sim]

Nice guide. Instead of directly mounting the block volume to attachments if could also be mounted to a generic mount point and have a subdirectory bind mounted to attachments.

This way one block volume could also be used for storing other data.

Yes - to be honest, I had not considered bind mounts - that does indeed get around the issue of using symbolic links (which cause problems with realpath when manipulating paths in PHP applications). I should add that as another option in the tutorial.

However, there's no reason not to have multiple volumes mounted to your Linode - you can have up to 8 volumes attached to a single Linode.

It's pretty easy to resize volumes too, so I don't even think it's worth worrying about the efficiency earned by pooling volume capacity into one shared volume - just use one volume per site/application. That also makes it much easier to move a site to a different server by simply unmounting the volume and then remounting it to the new server.

 

[radu81]

Media Gallery files are stored in the same place that attachments are, so yes it is possible to use block storage.

Didn't knew that, I still use an unofficial gallery add-on which is not updated to XF 2.x, but I will move soon to XF 2 and the official gallery. Thanks for your help.