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Selfhosted S3
I'm playing around with the idea of setting up some selfhosted S3 storage. The idea is to use it for backups, nextcloud and whatever else I might see fit. Mostly just personal playground.
So far I've looked at SeaweedFS, MinIO and Garage. Any quick thoughts or recommendations? I'm sure each solution has it's pros and cons and is suitable in different scenarios, anyone with some experience that can shed some light?


Comments
I personally only use (self hosted)S3 occasionally. Since I'm already using AList,I just use the S3 feature inbuilt.
I know Minio is pretty good
I installed and use minio at work, and personally using garage at my own lowend vps. Both are fine.
Usability-wise for personal use, I would recommend minio because of the web interface. But too resource intensive for my low end taste.
Garage was OK to install and use, uses very little resources. Doc is very good, I configured it to listen on localhost and a caddy reverse proxy doing SSL for it. Doing my rclone and restic backups to its buckets with no issues yet (3 months) -- restic restore check finds it all good.
show me the numbers?
Just current htop output. This is as idle as they get, nobody is using either one of them in this instant:
I evaluated and measured both when choosing our restic backend, and both performed well in the single-node simple configuration with huge zfs disks backend that was our goal.
In the small 2GB VPS trying minio, I found my VM sluggish at backup times, what I did not see with garage. I can tell that my restic backups are a tad bit slow with garage in that small VPS, but at least it does not gob down the entire server.
With minio community, you don't get disk monitoring, which is fucking lame.
This fits the picture I've got from only reading the docs.
Thank you.
I've only ever used minio and seaweedfs on hetzner.
When installed on a single node both work great. When used in a distributed way (multiple nodes) you should also set up a private network (an actual switch and LAN, not vswitch) and have the servers communicate over that rather than over the public network (internet), otherwise the performance will be very poor.
Minio has 1 TB limit? I remember this number, not sure recently still limit applicable. Or it may be for cluster?
That should be the strength of garage, his cluster code is oriented for coping well with nodes that may have high latencies in a geo distributed deployment.
If that limit is written in their docs anywhere, I definitely missed it.
For anyone else coming across this - garage looks a really good solution
Compared to Minio you're fine with 3 x garage nodes instead of the recommended 4 of minio.
& 1gb RAM is fine.
I use zipline https://zipline.diced.sh/ also good
Is there any S3 software like MinIO that can be deployed using Docker? I really hate configuring everything manually, which is very tough for migrations.
Anilist.......
Garage can be deployed in docker, really great self-hosted S3 app.
I wouldn't recommend Minio if using the community version. They have the habit of enshitifying by stripping away features from their free version to the paid one
Oh no , they removed admin panel
Minio used to be the preferred solution but since they stripped all the features out of the free edition, its looks like SeaweedFS is the way to go....
Oh they removed almost everything from admin panel
MinIO has always been my favorite, but unfortunately, as of April 2025, most administrative features were removed from the web UI in the free, open-source version. This change drastically limited what you can do through the graphical interface, leaving only a basic object browser.
For reference: LowEndBox article
Because of this, I continue to use version RELEASE.2025-04-22T22-12-26Z.
Garage + Garage WebUI is brilliant for self-hosting S3.
But it lacks versioning if I read that correctly?
To my knowledge, yes you are correct, for V1 at least. V2 has just been released so maybe it can/will be added? I’m not sure.
I like garage because of how simple it is to deploy and setup, but yes lacking more advance features that you might find with say, MinIO or others.
The problem isn't latency, it's Hetzner's unmetered 1 Gbps uplink. It will work much better with 10 Gbps, but you only get 20 TB of traffic on 10 Gbps with Hetzner, and their overage pricing isn't worth it.
Always Minio, best long-term stable, and enterprise grade solution, must use nvme drive,
its removed from GUI, but you can use mc, or use old version below 2025
RELEASE.2025-04-22T22-12-26Z is the last version that has GUI integration.
yepp,
i loved replication feature, but Erasure coding need more powerful cpu and data center nvme drive, it mostly slow down the write and delete speed, like 4x lower than read redundancy.
I recently started tinkering with Seaweedfs. Now I've a 4 node k3s cluster with swfs running on em all. Entirely a multi master cluster one leader is automatically elected through rafter quorum with a default replication set to 100 at least a copy on all dcs. It's been pretty solid so far, especially the write and read speeds. They offer a s3 interface as well
Which one is "better"?
SeaweedFS (with their S3 interface) or Garage?