I’ve been interested in self hosting a small variety of services yet I’m so confused on where to start. What would you guys recommend for a server machine?
My main uses (and some of the services I think are appropriate for the use case) are:
- 1tb photo, video storage, push/pull (immich)
- 512gb total shared between downloaded music storage (navidrome) and pdf/ebook storage (calibre)—all pull only
- 1tb movies/tv storage on a media server (jellyfin)
- 512gb storage for random junk or whatever, plus a file transfer push/pull (syncthing…? or nextcloud?)
- potential basic bio website hosting (near future)
- potential email hosting (distant future)
anyways with that all said i have a few questions:
- what server should i buy if i want to expand storage in the future? should i just build a pc with like 3x1tb storage, or 6x1tb storage w/ redundancy? totally confused about the concept of redundancy lol
- any thoughts on the services im suggesting? especially for file transfer
If you are a real and total noob try to get a synology, ugreen or another reputable brand of nas an start from there.
The point of having one of these is to avoid a big fuck up resulting in a data loss. An from there you will be able to Bild up what you need.
all the best in this journey
I would absolutely discourage the use of synology and probably any other brand in the NAS realm.
Synology has pulled of some really scummy things in the last few years with their certified SSDs where only a white list of SSDs could be used in an array or when they tried to push their own HDDa and show warnings and messengers to worry the user that something is wrong. Also they retroactively removed transcoding capabilities from their systems.
Those Systems are all quite limited for how expensive they are. They are great for just simple things but with the list OP posted, you would be heavily limited and have to jump through hoops in order to have a well functioning home lab/server.
I see your point but in this world there is only 2 options, or you have the skills, the knowledge and the time to do it by yourself, or you need to outsource it.
Assuming that the op is a real noob it is clear that the 2 first prerequisites are missing making that option unacceptable, then you can only go to the buy something easy enough for the general public.
And in top of that, in a homelab, the most sacred thing is the data, not the service, the data. If you misconfigure a nas or the automated backup system it could lead into the worst scenario: the data is lost forever.
Weighting everything I still recommend what I did. Although if instead of synology you prefer ugreen or asustor… Well that’s depends of your taste
But your not, outsourcing it?! You just choose a proprietary provider for a docker compose file! and some raid configuration. Everything ia still on you to fuck up.
Reading the Post again from OP, its clear that OP is clearly interessted in learning those things.
The exact same ia true for you synology NAS. + the limitations on how synology thinks you should do backups vs how it actually suits you.
I think you are missing the point how easy is to fuck things up in a console with truenas when trying to activate de duplication or making a backup VS the same thing in a user friendly, already tested private solution. Of course from the noob point of view.
Installing truenas when having no idea about almost anything is cumbersome, dealing with the millions options (some of them incompatible between them) is frustrating, cryptic error codes are discouraging…
You want people jump in? Then make it easy for them, lower the entry barrier, if not, you will find yourself alone in your ivory tower.
If you already know how to setup a proper backup system, balancing the pros and cons, with a robust and solid way to avoid data loss, then you don’t qualify for noob.
If you don’t know any of that and still makes yiur backup system, that’s the recipe of the disaster and you have real probabilities of losing data with nay option to recover.
No i think you are. Why should a beginner ever even touch the CLI? You can also SSH into the synology and fuck things up.
Using a ‘friendly environment’ like synology is not gurantee to not fuck things up.
What millions of options? You select a drive, and set a password and your done? 1 Set fewer then on synology.
You brought up TrueNas. TrueNas for example also gives you safe boundaries and suggestions how to set up things. Same as synology. There is literally also a setup wizard for backups.
AND AGAIN just because you follow the synology wizards does not mean your data is safe either. You always can fuck things up if you want to.
Agreed. An old machine with extra drives is both way cheaper and more flexible. A little more work, but nothing you can’t figure out with web searches and forum help.