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?
That's awesome to hear! This has been my hyperfixation for the past several months, so I'm happy to share all I've learned (and admittedly, there's still a lot for me learn myself)!
Here are a couple of videos which might help, one on clustering two machines together and one on Proxmox Backup Server (PBS). Although, I'm not sure if PBS can back up physical hosts (i.e., any arbitrary OS root filesystem running on bare metal as opposed to in a VM), but there's a ton of open source backup services you can run which might fit your needs. I think Duplicati might fit the bill for backing up desktop/laptop environments.
For Immich, I think your question depends on how you're running it. I'm not super familiar with ZFS (my NAS uses it internally, but it's mostly abstracted from my pov), but if you can set it up to use NFS (Network File Storage) then you should be able to use it from any networked system. So for example, if you're using a docker container (running on a Proxmox VM, LXC, etc), then you'd configure the docker volume to your ZFS NFS path.
I found YouTube links in your comment. Here are links to the same videos on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Link 1:
Link 2: