I am technologically skilled to some extent, but not nearly enough to justify the financial investment I'm about to make In a home server without checking that I'm not way off the mark. Reddit tech answers are usually useless, all jerking each other off about being the most vague and useless. So I'm here, just humbly asking if my plan will work before I waste a ton of money if it doesn't.
So I want to run immich, jellyfin, vaultwarden, and a couple other small programs (including backup automation) on a home server. The photos and videos are very important and I want off of large corporate cloud services for all the reasons you can imagine. There are about 2TB of important photos and data right now to backup.
So my plan: a mini pc with a low-level i3 or i5 chip but about 256gb SSD and 8gb ram. I will buy a UPS, a hub/NAS for 2 4TB HDDs, and a separate hub for backups elsewhere on another 4TB HDD. I already have a pc with an ok graphics card (only like 8 years old, but it was above average then) and good processor. My plan is to run the server with Linux, docker, and portainer on the mini-pc, and do the most intensive work (things like local Machine Learning on the photo library in immich) on the gaming pc. To save on energy, the mini pc is the only thing on most of the time, and I will turn on the old gaming pc to do the hard tasks.
I am hoping a friend will allow me to (somehow? I don't know how yet) keep a hub+HDD backup at their place which is updated weekly automatically whenever their computer turns on.
Is this all achievable? Am I missing something small or huge? Any tech people here know something that I'll likely miss on my first attempt?
Yeah just make sure you use tailscale or something like it to connect to the server dont expose it publicly.
nginx proxy manager and a domain name if you want SSL and hostnames for shiz
oh and test your backups, an untested backup isn't a backup at all
Thanks for the advice! How does one test a backup?? Just plug it into another laptop and check if the photos are viewable?
And I was going to use tailscale but without a domain. Idk how exactly that works yet, havent gotten so far, but thats possible right?
Depends on the type of backup. Images will be easy make sure you can decrypt and view. Then say you’re doing borg you wanna make sure to test system restore in a vm, docker volume backup restore etc etc. its a common IT issue that people schedule backups and find out the backup doesn’t work properly only after losing all their data
Doing a backup restore also then requires another backup or enough HDD space to do so on a VM, right? So I need an extra 4TB HDD somewhere to do that?
Are you like filling all these drives instantly to max capacity? Cant when setting it up test restoring your setup with a small amount of data first and once confirmed working start using it?
I mean technically you could have a mirror disaster recovery setup but that might be overkill it depends on how much you care about your data
No, definitely not instantly, but 1/3 immediately for sure. Luckily all the data is already in corporate clouds, so I can fuck around a bit with local versions until I stop paying them. So I could just run the system, check that it works, then trust it'll work the coming years? Or do I need to check that the backup works at every system update (like syncthing has an update or something)?
what is mirror disaster recovery> I was gonna do RAID 1 or 6... is that the same thing? I care about the data a lot! Enough to be spending what feels like a month's paycheck to keep it safe
I usually go for check it once at first setup to know my backup method works correctly and understand how restoring works you don’t really need to check at each update because at least in my experience server software doesn’t change that much. As long as you know it works you’re in a significantly better position than never knowing if it works at all.
Mirror system is basically configuring an identical server that mirrors all the data so if one goes down you can instantly switch to the other but its a bit more complex and a lot more costly.
My setup is a minipc amd apu with 32gb ram with a bunch of external drives plugged in. The pc itself i backup with borg so i can test that easily in a vm as it doesnt have the data itself just the os and software. Then for the external drives i have those copied and compressed once to my desktops massive array of hdd’s and then again to evil corporate cloud snapshotted each week with certain number of preserved versions.
This basically separates my restoration to two simplish steps of restore drives then mini pc and aside from maybe remounting the drives under the same path it should all be fine. If you can test that once before using the system in anger you will thank me for it later.
Raid is less a backup more…. Er idk what raid is useful for tbh. But I wouldn’t trust it to restore a system in many failure scenarios like if wrong data is written to drive a it writes it to drive b as well a backup should be a dated archived snapshot of a known working version you can restore from. Proper backup tools like borg do heavily compressed deltas so my entire os and software with multiple weeks of snapshots compresses down to like 60gb.
Oh and i also write documentation as i go on how i configure everything cos you will forget and you will wonder why you didnt write it down
Thanks for more info, super helpful! I wasn't really paying much attention to restoring the system near as much as keeping the data safe, but that might be giving it less attention than I actually should... My test environment was so easy to set up (with no external HDDs) that I was thinking that I didn't really need a backup of it, because with limited documentation I could make it again in a day or less.
But that brings me to documentation. You have any advice? I was going to make a diagram of the software and then hardware and then have a page for each connection or something. Like an architecture that references pages for the ways the things connect and what info goes where and how. Then also like the sites I got my info from to set up the programs. But I've never done it before so open to literally any idea! Every time I have to think about something, I try to write down what I did, too. But this becomes so quickly unmanagable.
I just make some basic markdown notes in joplin per service I configure. Like a page for automatic updates, page from cron, page for firewall, database etc etc. It’s nothing more than codeblocks of commands and bullet points for reference if i need to rebuild. Depending on how deep you go with self hosting you might end up with lots of notes like i have.
I dont have architecture diagrams though that sounds too much like my day job. Just enough so that you can rebuild it without guessing what you did last time if the machine were to implode.
nice, thanks for all your help, genuinely super nice