Should i selfhost?

Submitted ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨litron3000@feddit.org⁩ to ⁨selfhosted@lemmy.world⁩

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.

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Comments

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atzanteol@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

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.

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- litron3000@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  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
  
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  - MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    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.
    
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  - atzanteol@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    
    syncthing
    
    syncthing. is not. backups. Look into proper backups or be willing to lose data.
    
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DichotoDeezNutz@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
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.

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- litron3000@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  that would only handle the backups (and possible data loss) right?
  all the tinkering about the specific services is the same on unraid isn´t it?
  
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  - BartyDeCanter@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    A lot of NAS are capable of hosting containerized services. The Synology DS series, for example, can run everything you’ve mentioned and so much more. For a relatively gentle into check out mariushosting.com
    
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  - iAmTheTot@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Unraid is pretty simple to use. It has made setting up my services easy with just a little bit of googling for trouble shooting.
    
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- gofsckyourself@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Why unraid and not truenas?
  
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  - DichotoDeezNutz@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Easier to use imo. TrueNAS would be better, but takes more time to learn how to use.
    
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haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
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 forge.giftedmc.com/haui/Setup

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vzq@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
There is no compelling reason to run home assistant in a vm instead of in a container.

I’d get rid of the virtualization layer in your specific case and save yourself a lot of hassle, especially on smaller systems.

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- MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Doesn’t that require manual setup of the addons if you don’t run HA OS?
  
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  - litron3000@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    that was my reasoning as well: with HA OS it is as little trouble for me to maintain - at least that was my line of thinking
    
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  - vzq@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Yeah, just set them up in another container.
    
    Addons are just software.
    
    I only run mosquitto right now, but it’s not exactly hard or complicated or time consuming to set up.
    
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- haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Exactly how I see it and did it. Thanks for mentioning this.
  
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kata1yst@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
The best thing you can do to increase your confidence in the data reliability is to invest in backups AND doing at least RAID-1 on a reliable check-summing filesystem like ZFS, which Proxmox supports easily out of the box.

I have ZFS and cloud based backups and I’ve never lost or corrupted data in over 10 years.

And personally, I don’t back up my movies/TV shows. The volume is too high to bother and with ZFS snapshots and reliability, and the high seas being what they are, most everything is (eventually) recoverable.

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- litron3000@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  thank you
  that still leaves the part about all the hassle of maintaining every service on its own though
  
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  - kata1yst@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Maintenance is easier than you think. I “maintain” 40+ services by simply automatically updating them. And if that makes one stop working (very rare) I get an alert and fix it when I get time.
    
    I use ansible for that, though you could more easily accomplish much the same with Watchtower.
    
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