Hello all,
i know this seems like a stupid question to ask in this community, but i am serious.
To me: i am generally comfortable around computers, tried a few simple projects (like a music streamer based on a rpi) but i have no real education on this - all i do is follow the documentation and then google for troubleshooting. I am also (kinda) privacy focused and really annoyed at all the enshittification observable everywhere so i installed revanced and about half a year ago when i bought a new laptop i set my old thinkpad up as a proxmox-server. This is running my HomeAssistant-Instance in one VM and has another VM running ubuntu for my docker containers (paperless-ngx and immich). I really like the services these provide, but to be honest i feel uncomfortable with entrusting my data to them, as i am constantly worried i will break something and corrupt the data. Also i think i underestimated the amount of updates and maintenance that accumulates.
I am also not really willing to spend too much time learning all this from the ground up, as my dayjob is 8h in front of the computer anyway, so i dont want to spend my whole evening or weekend there as well.
I guess what i am really searching for is a service which i can just trust and pay for myself OR a very userfriendly suite of selfhosted apps.
Services i need would be:
- general cloud storage
- document organization (a la paperless-ngx)
- photos
I would also like:
- some kind of shared notes
- a media suite (like plex)
I am fine with Home Assistant, as that has no real consequences should i really mess it up badly
Thank you for any suggestions on how to move on in this matter.
i feel uncomfortable with entrusting my data to them, as i am constantly worried i will break something and corrupt the data
Backups. If you’re not willing to setup and test proper backups then no - you should not self-host.
currently i am doing them manually everytime i am changing something. I had to deploy them before (successfully) but if i am going to keep going with the selfhosting route i am planning to set up syncthing to the NAS of a friend
I’d say syncthing is not really a backup solution.
If for some reason something happens to a file on one side, it’ll also happen to the file on the other side, so you’ll loose your “backup”.
Plus, what ensures you your friend won’t be going around and snooping or making their own copies of your data.
Use a proper backup software to send your data offsite (restic, borg, duplicati, etc) which will send it encrypted (use a password manager to set a strong and unique password for each backup)And follow the 3-2-1 rule MangoPenguin mentioned.
Remember, this rule is just for data you can’t find anywhere else, so just your photos, your own generated files, databases of the services you self-host, stuff like that. If you really want you could make a backup of hard to find media, but if you already have a torrent file, then don’t go doing backup of that media.Thank you for actually explaining why it’s not suitable
I will look into those should I decide to keep this setup runningSpeaking of which, what’s the most frugal cloud backup method these days?
I use backblaze, which by consensus seemed to be the best bang for buck option that I found when I looked into this a few months ago.
I pay in the ballpark of $1AUD a month to host my backups on backblaze - they currently sit at around the 200GB mark. And then I have duplicacy doing the actual backup and encryption and then it sends it over to backblaze.
The general rule is the 3-2-1 rule, so 3 copies of your data, 2 different storage types, and 1 of them offsite.
Make sure you run backups at least daily too for your data, and keep a month or so worth of incremental snapshots.
Restic + Backblaze B2 is great for an offsite backup.
I only had to read like three or four sentences to arrive at the conclusion: yes, you should absolutely self host and you‘re already pretty far.
Depending on your location, I suggest you first visit your local hackspace, if that exists. I have had a similar journey and it took me years to arrive at my current state. Had I learned about „hacker communities“ earlier, I would have taken a very different and less stressful path.
You can check my personal setup at https://forge.giftedmc.com/haui/Setup
You can find reasonably stable and easy to manage software for everything you listed.
I know this is horribly unpopular around here, but you should, if you want to go this route, look at Nextcloud. It 's a monolithic mess of PHP, but it’s also stable, tested, used and trusted in production, and doesn’t have a history of lighting user data on fire.
It also doesn’t really change dramatically, because again, it’s used by actual businesses in actual production, so changes are slow (maybe too slow) and methodical.
The common complaints around performance and the mobile clients are all valid, but if neither of those really cause you issues then it’s a really easy way to handle cloud document storage, organization, photos, notes, calendars, contacts, etc. It’s essentially (with a little tweaking) the entire gSuite, but self-hosted.
That said, you still need to babysit it, and babysit your data. Backups are a must, and you’re responsible for doing them and testing them. That last part is actually important: a backup that doesn’t have regular tests to make sure they can be restored from aren’t backups they’re just thoughts and prayers sitting somewhere.
You could but a NAS, or build one and install unraid on it. It should take a day or so of tinkering to get it working, and you could always sync your data to a cloud backup provider.
