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?
You are largely on the right path. Get your HDDs second hand and you will save a lot, and you probably don't need a separate hub for the server as they could just go straight into the motherboard. Check its model to make sure it supports at least 4 sata ports for expandability (ideally 6+ but harder to find). Use the HDDs in a raid configuration which protects data if one fails.
A UPS is probably overkill unless you live somewhere with regular power outages, and even then you might not really need one... Could be something you get down the line rather than immediately if cost is a concern.
For CPU I recently built my home server with an Intel i5 12500T that I got used with a warranty. The iGPU on it is actually great and handles transcoding for jellyfin exceptionally well. I run it all through docker on debian and drivers are all fine for it too (there is a bit of setup for GPU support with the docker image but not much). Personally I would not bother with portainer and use docker+docker compose directly. It's fairly simple to set up an ssh connection from your pc to the server over your local network for admin work. If you go down a path which has you using gluetun then I highly recommend you do not use portainer to manage that setup.
I do some machine learning on my music library with just 32GB ram and the cpu. It's running 24/7 and not urgent so I never bothered with a GPU. ML runs just fine on a CPU, but a bit slow. You may find you don't need a gpu for image analysis workloads.
Generally you want to keep power consumption low. I run around 20 docker containers giving me a full backup system, home media system, gaming servers for friends, and a few other things which totals around 1.5Kw per day. Where I live this works out at at around an hour of minimum wage per month to run. I suspect if I went with a laptop oriented CPU I may have made some more savings here.
For off site backups I would personally just store historical data on an encrypted external SSD then leave it with a friend. Gets a bit trickier to do it in real time but if you go that route then use tailscale as other have suggested. Do not port forward anything to your server or your friend's house as it's a unnecessary risk which you can skip with tailscale.
I am wary of second hand HDD's because basically my main goal with this whole thing is to safely and reliably save the personal photo's and video's. So that was the one thing I didn't want to rely on second-hand. Is that not smart? I have a (possibly unfounded) fear of HDD failure.
I also have that fear but I have yet to have a hard drive fail on me in over a decade. If you are not doing heavy write usage then they are unlikely to fail. In my main PC I have a HDD I use to store game files which is now in its 14th year of usage. I would personally not trust it with sensitive data but it hasn't failed on me yet.
Having a good raid setup also means you can have failure without losing anything. You also will have an off site backup on top of that. If cost is a concern it is something to consider as it can be a lot cheaper. I have at rest encryption and a warranty on the used drives, so if they fail soon after I get them setup I just return them for another.
Depending on consumer laws around used returns where you live you could use the 'SMART' tooling on the drives (it's a built in self reporting on health/usage duration etc) to discover if the drive is still good to use and return it if not.
Thanks for your help, I ended up getting 2nd hand ones from old enterprise refurbishers. They were soooooo much cheaper lol
This is good to know. Helps my fears a bit. Consumer rights are pretty good, though the used market is shit where Im at.
I hope to have more money in a few years, I have had some things that have made me unable to spend too much recently... Then I could afford to get new HDDs earlier, I guess.