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?
From your post, you seem ready for it. Go for it. The most important thing is to have it, and use it!
It's always nice to have as much performance as possible, but the minimum specs you posted will work. You might run into issues with Jellyfin's on-the-fly video transcoding if you go too slow, but you can work around that. Modern hardware can be suprisingly low-power, too. But don't set yourself an arbitrarily low power limit; a PC drawing 40 watts only costs ~$50 a year to run continiously.
The approach I took is: a raspberri pi with a big hard drive plugged in to my parent's router. All it does is auto-backup from my home server.
I know people are going to freak out about exposing a sever to the internet, and that definately is a risk. But honestly, what's the point of the server if it's not exposed to the internet?
I was definitely going to expose it to the internet, or at least through tailscale make it available remotely. I want to look at my pictures everywhere!
But is your raspberry pi running like docker and portainer instance? Or how did you do the auto-backup?
Docker didn't even exist yet when I first set it up, and so I never used it.
I did eventually upgrade to a Raspberry Pi 3. It just runs Debian and Syncthing to auto-sync a few folders. Nothing complex going on. I'll ssh into it once a year or so when I'm visiting my parents to make sure everything is working.
Oh damn, you've been at it for a while. Impressed!
The best advice I can give is: make notes about how you set up stuff, so you can duplicate your work years down the line. I've updated hardware on my main server and my little remote raspberry pi twice, and I was very thankful that I took copious notes.