Submitted 4 months ago by iso@lemy.lol to selfhosted@lemmy.world
Not exactly self hosting but maintaining/backing it up is hard to me. So many “what if”s are coming to my mind. Like what if DB gets corrupted? What if the device breaks? If on cloud provider, what if they decide to remove the server?
I need a local server and a remote one that are synced to confidentially self-host things and setting this up is hassle I don’t want to take.
So my question is how safe is your setup? Are you still enthusiastic with it?
My incredible hatred and rage for not understanding things powers me on the cycle of trying and failing hundreds of times till I figure it out. Then I screw it all up somehow and the cycle begins again.
I have a rack in my garage.
My advice, keep it simple, keep it virtual.
I dumpster dove for hardware and run proxmox on hosts. Not even clustered, just simple stand alone proxmox hosts. Connect to my Synology storage device and done.
I run next cloud for webDav contacts and calendar (fuck Google), it does photo and do. Storage. The next client is free from F-Droid for Android and works on debian desktops like a charm.
I run Minecraft server
I run home automation server
I run a media server.
Proxmox backs everything up on schedule
All I need to do is get off-site backup setup for Synology important data and I’m all set.
It’s really not as hard as you think if you keep it simple
All of your issues can be solved by a backup. My host went out of business. I set up a new server, pulled my backups, and was up and running in less than an hour.
I’d recommend docker compose. Each service gets its own folder inside your docker folder. All volumes are a folder in the services folder. Each night, run a script that stops all of them, starts duplicati, backs up to a remote server or webdav share or whatever, and then starts them back up again. If you want to be extra safe, back up to two locations. It’s not that complicated if it’s just your own services.
Others have said this, but it’s always a work in progress.
What started out as just a spare optiplex desktop and needing a dedicated box for Minecraft and valheim servers, to now having a rack in my living room with a few key things I and others rely on. You definitely aren’t alone XD
Regular, proactive work goes a long way. I also stated creating tickets for myself, each with a specific task. This way I could break things down, have reminders of what still needs attention, and track progress.
Do you host your ticketing system? I’d like to try one out. My TODO markings in my notes app don’t end up organized enough to be helpful. My experience is with JIRA, which I despise with every fiber of my being.
I have set up forgejo, which is a fork of gitea. It’s a git forge, but its ticketing system is quite good.
Try Vikunja, it might tick the box for you.
Mostly I just use nextclouds deck extension. It behaves close enough to what I need as a solo operation.
First of all ignore the trends. Fuck docker, fuck nixos, fuck terraform or whatever tech stack gets shilled constantly.
Find a tech stack that is easy FOR YOU and settle on that. I haven’t changed technologies for 4 years now and feel like everything can fit in my head.
Second of all, look at the other people using commercial services and see how stressed they are. Google banned my account, youtube has ads all the time, the app for service X changed and it’s unusable and so on.
Nothing comes for free in terms of time and mental baggage
Yes, you should use something that makes sense to you but ignoring docker is likely going to cause more aggravation than not in the long term.
Yep, I went in this direction…until I gave in during a bare metal install of something…
Docker is not hassle free but usually most setup guides for apps are much much easier with docker
Docker is not a shill tech stack. It is a core developer tool that is certainly not required, but is certainly not fluff
Not exactly self hosting but maintaining/backing it up is hard for me. So many “what if”s are coming to my mind. Like what if DB gets corrupted? What if the device breaks? If on cloud provider, what if they decide to remove the server?
Backups. If you follow the 3-2-1 backup strategy, you don’t have to worry about anything.
Isn’t it enough to have a single offsite backup?
Yeah, that’s exactly what the 3-2-1 rule says.
Don’t over think it, start small, a home server. Then add stuff, you will see that it’s not that crazy.
I personally have just one home server that locally creates encrypted backups and uploads them to backblaze.
This gives me the privacy I need as everything is on my server that I own while also having the backups on a big reliable company.
It’s not perfect but it fits my threat model
I started as more “homelab” than “selfhosted” as first - so I was just stuffing around playing with things, but then that seemed sort of pointless and I wanted to run real workloads, then I discovered that was super useful and I loved extracting myself from commercial cloud services (dropbox etc). The point of this story is that I sort of built most of the infrastructure before I was running services that I (or family) depended on - which is where it can become a source of stress rather than fun, which is what I’m guessing you’re finding yourself in.
There’s no real way around this (the pressure you’re feeling), if you are running real services it is going to take some sysadmin work to get to the point where you feel relaxed that you can quickly deal with any problems. There’s lots of good advice elsewhere in this thread about bit and pieces to do this - the exact methods are going to vary according to your needs. Here’s mine (which is not perfect!).
I still have lots of single points of failure - Tailscale, my internet provider, my domain provider etc, but I think I’ve addressed the most common which would be hardware failures at home. My monitoring is also probably sub-par, I’m not really looking at logs unless I’m investigating a problem. Maybe there’s a Netdata or something in my future.
You’ve mentioned that a syncing to a remote server for backups is a step you don’t want to take, if you mean managing your own is a step you don’t want to take, then your solutions are a paid backup service like backblaze or, physically shuffling external USB drives (or extra NASs) back and forth to somewhere - depending on what downtime you can tolerate.
TrueNAS scale helps a lot, as it makes many popular apps just a few clicks away. Or for more power-users, stuff like the linux cockpit also really helps.
To directly answer your questions…
As an alternative, Unraid. While it’s paid, it strips away a lot of the hassle you mentioned in your post. Has a built in shop where you just click, set up ports/shares and docker containers just spin up for you.
While I’m not a huge fan of their recent subscription model change, I do love their OS (I got I’m still grandfathered into the pre-existing perpetual license.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| DNS | Domain Name Service/System |
| HA | Home Assistant automation software |
| ~ | High Availability |
| HTTP | Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web |
| RAID | Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage |
| nginx | Popular HTTP server |
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I got tired of having to learn new things. The latest was a reverse proxy that I didn’t want to configure and maintain. I decided that life is short and just use samba to serve media as files. One lighttpd server for my favourite movies so I can watch them from anywhere. The rest I moved to free online services or apps that sync across mobile and desktop.
Caddy took an afternoon to figure out and setup, and it does your certs for you.
Unfortunately, I feel the same. As I observed from the commenters here, self-hosting that won’t break seems very expensive and laborious.
Reverse proxy is actually super easy with nginx. I have an nginx server at the front of my server doing the reverse proxy and an Apache server hosting some of those applications being proxied.
Basically 3 main steps:
🤷♂️ I could spend that two hours with my kids.
You aren't wrong, but as a community I think we should be listening carefully to the pain points and thinking about how we could make them better.
I had a pretty decent self-hosted setup that was working locally. The whole project failed because I couldn’t set up a reverse proxy with nginx.
I am no pro, very far from it, but I am also somewhat Ok with linux and technical research. I just couldn’t get nginx and reverse proxies working and it wasn’t clear where to ask for help.
fuck nginx and fuck its configuration file with an aids ridden spoon, it’s everything but easy if you want anything other than the default config for the app you want to serve
My advice would be, be pragmatical, an error on a backup script I did not notice wiped the time tracking data I had been collecting on my self hosted database for over a year. I got really anxious at first, because of my mistake and because of the data lost. But at the end of the day… Who cares, life goes on, this is only a hobby.
Not safe at all. I look for robustness. I prefer thinking about things that do not break easily (like ZFS and RAIDZ) instead of “what could possibly go wrong”
And I have never quite figured out how to do restores, so I neglect backups as well.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Yeah. It is kinda hard.
Backups. First and foremost.
Now once that is sorted, what if your DB gets corrupted. You test your backups
Learn how to verify and restore
It is a hassle. That’s why there is a constant back and forth between on prem and cloud in the enterprise
I think “hard” is the wrong word. After all, it’s just a matter of mashing the right combination of buttons on your keyboard. It’s complicated…
Nothing proves a backup like forcing yourself to simulate a recovery! I like to make one setting change, then make a backup, and then delete everything and try to rebuild it from scratch to see if I can do it and prove the setting change is still there
We do a quarterly test.
I have the DB guy make a change, I nuke it and ensure I can restore it.
For us. I don’t work for Veeam, while I don’t like their licensing. Veeam is pretty good
Hth
Immutable Nixos. My entire server deployment from partitioning to config is stored in git on all my machines.
Every time I boot all runtime changes are “wiped”, which is really just BTRFS subvolume swapping.
Persistence is possible, but I’m forced to deal with it otherwise it will get wiped on boot.
I use LVM for mirrored volumes for local redundancy.
My persisted volumes are backed up automatically to B2 Backblaze using rclone. I don’t backup everything. Stuff I can download again are skipped for example. I don’t have anything currently that requires putting a process in “maint mode” like a database getting corrupt if I backup while its being written to. When I did, I’d either script gracefully shutting down the process or use any export functionality if the process supported it.
Automate as much as possible. I rsync to both an online and home NAS for all of my hosted stuff, both at home and in the cloud. Updates for the OS and low level libraries are automated. The other updates are generally manual, that allows me to set aside time for fixing problems that updates might cause while still getting most of the critical security updates. And my update schedules are generally during the day, so that if something doesn’t restart properly, I can fix it.
Also, whenever possible I assume a fair amount of time for updates, far beyond what it should actually take. That way I won’t be rushed to fix the problem and end up having to revert to a backup and find time later to redo it. Then most of the time I have extra time for analyzing stats to see if I can improve performance or save money with optimizations.
I’ve never had a remote provider just suddenly vanish though I use fairly well known hosts. And as for local hardware, I just have to do without until I can buy a replacement. Or if it’s going to be some time, I do have old hardware that I could set up as a makeshift, temporary replacement like old desktop computers and some hardware that I use for experimenting like my Le Potato that isn’t powerful enough for much, but ok for the short term.
And finally I’ve been moving to more container-based setups that are easier to get up and running again. I’ve been experimenting with Nomad, Docker Swarm, K3s, etc., along with Traefik and some other reverse proxies so o can keep the workers air-gapped for security.
I try to balance things between what I find enjoyable/ worth the effort, and what ends up becoming more of a recurring headache
My setup is pretty safe. Every day it copies the root file system to its RAID. It copies them into folders named after the day of the week, so I always have 7 days of root fs backups. From there, I manually backup the RAID to a PC at my parents’ house every few days. This is started from the remote PC so that if any sort of malware infects my server, it can’t infect the backups.
Off-site backups that are still local is brilliant.
I feel like there are better ways to do this but it isn’t terrible
Pretty solid backup strategy :) I like it.
It doesn’t have to be hard - you just need to think methodically through each of your services and assess the cost of creating/storing the backup strategy you want versus the cost (in time, effort, inconvenience, etc) if you had to rebuild it from scratch.
For me, that means my photo and video library (currently Immich) and my digital records (Paperless) are backed up using a 2N+C strategy: a copy on each of 2 NASes locally, and another copy stored in the cloud.
Ditto for backups of my important homelab data. I have some important services (like Home Assistant, Node-RED, etc) that push their configs into a personal Gitlab instance each time there’s a change. So, I simply back that Gitlab instance up using the same strategy. It’s mainly raw text in files and a small database of git metadata, so it all compresses really nicely.
For other services/data that I’m less attached to, I only backup the metadata.
Say, for example, I’m hosting a media library that might replace my personal use of services that rhyme with “GetDicks” and “Slime Video”. I won’t necessarily backup the media files themselves - that would take way more space than I’m prepared to pay for. But I do backup the databases for that service that tells me what media files I had, and even the exact name of the media files when I “found” them.
In a total loss of all local data, even though the inconvenience factor would be quite high, the cost of storing backups would far outweigh that. Using the metadata I do backup, I could theoretically just set about rebuilding the media library from there. If I were hosting something like that, that is…
I have limited my usecases for selfhosting and thrown money at the problem. The usecases are:
The last one is expendable. The first three are backed up into the cloud. I use a Synology, thus throwing money at the problem. Their cloud backup just works.
I work IT for my day job managing a datacenter and cloud infrastructure.
I host mostly Plex, home assistant, and immich. Immich has its data backed up, I don’t care about Plex data. If it all dies, so be it.
I have a server coloed that houses some websites and email, plus some random other things I’ve setup and tested. It’s got backups, and downtime is fine.
If my self hosted stuff dies, it doesn’t matter. Nothing in my life ultimately relies on it.
Snapshots are the first line of defense for recovery from software errors. For hardware use ZFS raid.
That still isn’t a proper backup. Have a separate backup that can not easily be destroyed.
Rentlar@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
Right now I just play with things at a level that I don’t care if they pop out of existence tomorrow.
If you want to be truly safe (at an individual level, not an institutional level where there’s someone with an interest in fucking your stuff up), you need to make sure things are recoverable unless 3 completely separate things go wrong at the same time (an outage at a remote data centre, your server fails and your local backup fails). Very unlikely for all 3 to happen simultaneously, but 1 is likely to fail and 2 is forseeable, so you can fix it before the 3rd also fails.
scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 4 months ago
Exactly right there with the not worrying. Getting started can be brutal. I always recommend people start without worrying about it, be okay with the idea that you’re going to lose everything.
When you start really understanding how the tech works, then start playing with backups and how to recover. By that time you’ve probably set up enough that you are ready for a solution that doesn’t require setting everything up again. When you’re starting though? Getting it up and running is enough
andyburke@fedia.io 4 months ago
Gonna just stream of consciousness some stuff here:
Been thinking lately, especially as I have been self-hosting more, how much work is just managing data on disk.
Which disk?
Where does it live?
How does the data transit from here to there?
Why isn't the data moving properly?
I am not sure what this means, but it makes me feel like we are missing some important ideas around data management at personal scale.