So far I have been looking at things from the sidelines, trying to learn about self hosting by osmosis just by being part of the community and reading what people are doing. Most of the time though posts are too far for my knowledge or needs and the rest of times they are too simple a solution or directed at people just starting. I guess I’m in a middle uncomfortable ground :)
Pair that with ADHD and the huge amount of options available and I have ended up with a decision paralysis that I’m just trying to finally shake off.
So with that introduction out of the way, I’ll start laying down the details of what I’m looking for, what I have so far and what I wish to get from this post. Hopefully I can make it short enough without lacking in information.
WHAT I HAVE SO FAR
I have a couple of old laptops I’ve been using to play around with self hosting. One is running Endeavour OS (arch based) and I have put a few *arrs there, not even docker based. Also Jellyfin, Calibre, … It was literally the first thing I set up and of course now I’d do things differently but I’ll slowly change that with time.
I got my hands on a second laptop and decided to try some different approach and some new things. Threw some stable Debian at it and installed casaOS. Started installing a few services there, wireguard to try and provide secure remote access to myself (and hoping to get some future access alternative to some others without it, but let’s not get distracted by a different topic), tried putting calibre-web to give myself access to calibre on the other machine (and so far failed at it but barely tried anything to get it to work), some other *arrs are also in casaos, and all the other services in the other laptop are configured in casaOS to provide one access point to all. I have in my mind to set up also immich and some file syncing/editor and self hosted note application. But haven’t done that because I lack a trust worthy storage set up.
Aside of that I got from home assistant one of their green devices to support it and that one is entirely dedicated to home assistant.
Well, hopefully that gives a bit of background on what I have so far and how I am just messing with things and trying different services for better or worse 🙃
WHAT I AM LACKING
Obviously, by the post title and what I have said so far, I’m looking to improve the storage system I have, which is… A simple and starting to be oldish external hard drive with 8TB size. I’m kinda scared of it breaking… Even thinking of going to get a second ext drive to create a copy for now. But well, that’s my fault and my problem. I have been postponing getting a NAS because the options are just so wildly open. I don’t want anything super complex, but I don’t want to end up using some synology and depend on their software or whatever. I want to get some hardware I’m the owner of and set it up with some open source solution. But there are so many options! Plus setting a whole NAS from scratch seems to be quite expensive and about to get more expensive with the storage market situation.
WHAT I HOPE TO GET IN THIS POST
I don’t expect anyone to tell me what to do or what is the perfect solution, but I hope I can get some feedback, some help on choosing what could be a good path to start, and solve my decision paralysis so I can give the first steps which will likely tie me up to what I get first for the foreseeable future.
What I think I need is a 4 bay (at least) device where I can install some trueNAS or alternative that is simpler hopefully, something that is not too expensive. I’m willing to compromise on hard drive speed and format to get a better price. Of course I’d rather get M.2 SSD drives if someone has a cheap alternative :D
I’ve been looking at the different RAID levels to understand which I would need (WIP) but basically I’d hope to have some back up system and more space than now with the option to expand in the future. I have no experience administering such system but I don’t have an issue with learning it on the spot when I need to up the sizes etc. For context, my 8 TB are nearly full (at 7 used), it has taken a looooong time for it to be full, but the size requirements would only increase with immich and files and notes for the whole family. Maybe I would want to have different hard drives for personal data and media storage… Eggs in baskets and so on.
Well, thank you all for coming to my ted talk, I hope I have set up enough of the details that might help you help me help myself without boring you to death or making you give up on reading this :)
Well hello all again. I come with an update, after a few days of looking around and searching for options after all your valuable feedback and input.
For all those saying “backups” and “3-2-1”, yes, very important indeed and has given me extra to think about, but it is also not really what I was looking for. That doesn’t mean your input was bad, wrong or unused, it made me think deeper about that topic too and plan towards it, but it was not answering my original question, needing a better, safer, data storage solution hopefully using OSS.
As I already have a couple old laptops I would rather avoid getting extra hardware in that sense, and the idea of the DAS, which was new for me, seemed exactly what will provide what I need. Expandable storage solution to stack some HDDs, I can connect that to one of my existing laptops where I can install OMV (openmediavault) to deal with the drives and storage and use it for the storage of data. I’m getting a centmate with 4 bays, I’ll put one drive for now of 14 or 16 TB and later add another mirrored with btrfs or raid 1. In the future I’ll increase the space as needed.
For the backup I’ll keep using my external drive connected to the other laptop where I’ll probably keep EndeavourOS for now. The most valuable data I will set syncthing or some other alternative but I already have backup of some of the most important stuff so I’m not in a hurry with it.
I think at the time I have the kind of plan I needed. So thank you all for giving some advice, experience, and knowledge. It has kicked me out of indecision hell.