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.
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.
thank you
a friend has nextcloud setup, i will ask him about it / try his setup regarding performance
Seafile is another to check. It's focused entirely on the file storage aspect and doesn't really do all the other stuff next Cloud does but I greatly prefer it