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?
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.