A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| NAS | Network-Attached Storage |
| RAID | Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage |
| SMB | Server Message Block protocol for file and printer sharing; Windows-native |
| ZFS | Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity |
[Thread #100 for this comm, first seen 17th Feb 2026, 19:51] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
We need to, but can we?
I had purchased first 12TB drive for 4 bay NAS last summer. These are fuckton expensive so couldnt get all 4. I finally saved up and bought 2nd 12TB drive to get to RAID 1 for redundancy. Not even month passed, WD reports no more drives. Shop where I got one reports out of stock. FUCK!
Fuck AI and fuck big tech. I got my 12tb cloud and will give you 0 money in near future.
Yeah. I have a RAIDz2 on super old version of FreeNAS. 8x4TB.
I’ve been needing to upgrade for about a year now. I’ve been waiting for the prices to go lower…. News about WD forced my hand for 8x18TB. Not $$ I was looking to spend, but fomo that my upgrade could now be much further away pushed me to just do it. :(
Realistically it's worse than that right? Where is your second and third 12tb drive for back ups? Raid is a nice to have but meaningless when it comes to back ups.
Most of my storage is media - movies and series. Immich, Nextcloud and personal files take little less than 300GB. I do backups weekly to NAS storage, monthly to storage SSD in my PC and to an external HDD. I am looking into way to somehow be able to backup to a rpi3 that I have installed at my father's place. This might cover my 3-2-1 needs, just need to figure out that 1.
I had two 20TB drives in my cart three months ago for $350 each. Today they’re $420
You can still go with unraid and buy more, smaller drives. Buy used SAS drives and an HBA. I recently bought a refurbished Dell optiplex with 32 gigs of ram and some i5 processor off eBay for 100€. SAS drives are really loud and consume more energy than consumer HDDs, but they last very long and are way cheaper.
Cant. My nas is weak and cant run unraid. Raid5 and Raid6 is what I can achieve.
Buy old servers.
How old are we talking?
I run on dual Xeon R410s with 128Gb of RAM (2013?). Got them for free, on Kijiji. Runs Proxmox on both and a pile of VMs. Dual GB nics, 6 SAS bays, HBA in IT mode for ZFS. Has iLo for OOB management, or whatever the Dell equivalent is.
I mean, it's not fast, but each server has 24 cores and I can chunk PDF files fairly quickly for RAG on 10 cores and have plenty for mail server, Nextcloud, K8S running some side hustle apps, etc, etc. Kind of a noisy prick when it winds up though.
Punch cards are cheap.
I have 1 tb usb
Buy from third world then
Mhm, waiting for ai bubble to burst so I can upgrade my current rig to something future proof
Yeah but I cannot find any HDDs
I am SO pissed off about this AI hardware grab causing global shortages, im about to revert to using fucking tape drives for storage and core rope memory as RAM.
Its by design, I swear. They don't have anywhere to run any of this gear, its all piling up somewhere.
Either that or it doesn't exist and what we're seeing is price gouging based on hypothetical demand based off of "letters of intent" that aren't actually worth the paper they're written on.
I think its the latter.
It’s definitely the latter. These are writing contracts to buy hardware that has yet to be produced for data centres that haven’t been built. All so they can satisfy a demand that doesn’t yet exist for a product no one is going to be willing to pay for.
It will crash. This whole grift is too expensive to keep going. The naysayers keep forgetting that hardware gets old, it wears out and fails, and gets superseded by newer models. The chip makers are riding high now because the idiotic belief of the market is that this will keep growing as the data centres keep being built and the AI companies will keep buying new hardware.
It just can’t. This candle is burning fast at both ends.
It just can’t. This candle is burning fast at both ends.
I hope you're right b/c right now feels like the classic "market can stay irrational longer than we can stay liquid" type situation.
Yep, Western Digital said they were sold out of drives for all of 2026. Since 2026 is just starting, they haven't actually produced those drives or gotten actual money for them.
Hopefully the bubble pops soon, though I hate that Americans' 401Ks and IRAs will take the brunt of the "losses" when it does.
Yep, Western Digital said they were sold out of drives for all of 2026. Since 2026 is just starting, they haven't actually produced those drives or gotten actual money for them.
This is exceedingly normal procedure for manufacturing companies, and not limited to tech industry by any means. They know how much they can potentially produce on their lines, if they have predicted customers to fulfill the capacity for a full year they are basically sold out despite not having produced most of it yet.
The company I work for also has "sold out" for several of our factories because we have orders for 110% production capacity on them. Orders are not paid up front, they never are in any industry, it's always paid after delivery usually with a 30-90 days delay (and even more in some cases).
There is nothing spectacularly weird or out of place in the announcement they've made, it's basically standard procedure.
Yeah, the issue is that it drove up the price to justify price-gouging even though it's likely these won't actually get purchased. They shouldn't reserve nearly all of their product for pending transactions. They should fulfill actual demand before theoretical ones. This is clearly only possible because of the industry consolidation into essentially a monopoly. If they still had real competitors, they'd have to actually sell for a fair price and they'd be concerned that they likely won't get paid for these "reservations".
The whole thing is speculation because its based off the back of letters of intent, no real contracts for anything. Its all still, currently, smoke and mirrors until something is inked and someone gets paid (or atleast, finance agreed)
So right now, we're watching bullshit speculators sink the market. And/or restricted supply being used to milk us like cows.
I scored some new WD 14tb drives for $120 US last October, and I am glad I did! Was a hell of a deal.
Wow thats awesome I'm so happy for you.
Not sure how to add alt text on mobile but thats a rat clenching his fist
I did not see the fist so am glad you added the text. Awesome rat!
When I first got my Synologies set up (~2024), I got 4x 12TB refurb DC drives for $75 each from goharddrive on eBay. Today, those same drives are $220 each. Absolutely ridiculous.
So now instead of expanding my space, I just cut back on my usage to make more room, bc it'll be a long time before I can afford an upgrade.
I run, my own:
I do believe, you may in fact, perhaps, be a nerd.
You don't happen to have a simple how-to or wiki for these services do you?
Official documentation is all well and good but sometimes it can be a nightmare to follow and understand (Nextcloud for example had me pulling my hair) for us mere nerdlings that haven't achieved full nerdhood yet.
Jellyfin is great. My latest addition to my media ecosystem was audiobookshelf which is really nice as well if you like to listen to ebooks.
Jellyfin and Immich jave stayed as mainstays after like 2 dozen projects I've tried on. That and a Samba share.
How was setting up immich? Looking to expand and that seems interesting.
Give it a go, I just finished the docker with tailscale setup. Using parts of this guide from Alex from tailscale https://youtu.be/guHoZ68N3XM (for the ones saying don't post yt links, I've not seen an add in the past 6 years or so, just use revanced) 2 hickups I had to overcome: a dns issue and different gpu passthrough then jellyfin uses). Reason was unpriviliged lxc in proxmox in both cases. But I prefer an lxc in this case. Just lost 2hrs looking back at old photos, it works great! Rdy for introducing it to my non tech wife!
Beginner here. What do you mean by a Samba share? Do you mean a shared network folder? Or something more elaborate?
Yes they mean a SMB share. A type of network share that works (mostly) with Linux and windows.
Why GitLab and Gitea?
I run gitea on a different kind of internet.......
So they can push and pull at the same time, silly!
Duh
Wouldn’t this topic be more appropriate in other communities? Preaching to the choir here.