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.
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.
Speaking 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.