I’m in the means of buying a mini pc for selfhosting stuff. My main reasons are sailing the high seas for movies and series and hosting my families photos, videos to escape gdrive. I’m thinking about some kind of DMS / digitalizing paperwork and mail in the future.

I casually look into all kinds of software that could do the task and now I’m a bit overwhelmed. Is owncloud or an alternative enough, or do I need something more elaborated like TrueNAS? But all the NAS Foss stuff seems to run on their own OS. Can my Pirate Ship run on that? I feel like the diversity of solutions is making this very opaque for me.

  • sol@lemm.eeEnglish
    2·
    10 hours ago

    I run OpenMediaVault as it brings plenty of nice features together like SMART disk monitoring, resource usage monitoring, easy RAID creation, FTP/SSH/browser access, etc. You don’t strictly need it (or TrueNAS, UnRAID, etc) but it’s nice. Unlike TrueNAS and others, OMV seems easier to install on an existing Linux distribution (I run it on Debian).

    For important stuff that you really don’t want to lose, you probably want to set up a RAID array of some description. The various NAS solutions like OMV or TrueNAS will make that easier but you can do it without them. It does mean you’ll want a lot of storage (disks will probably be the most expensive part of your setup) and you’ll want your PC to be able to accommodate multiple hard drives (I would think at least 4) particularly if you want to run a RAID.

    Jellyfin is good for streaming. Beyond that I don’t know much about sailing the seas at scale.

    Nextcloud is decent for file storage and has a few good addons that allow you to use it to selfhost calendars, contact, Joplin notes, etc.

    Paperless-ngx is a good solution for digitising documents.

    Yes there are plenty of different solutions out there but after a while you come to see that as a feature rather than a bug. Selfhosting definitely carries a lot more friction than outsourcing it all to Google, so it’s something you need to get used to. It helps if you can view the process itself as a hobby rather than a chore and embrace the fact that you will need to learn a lot to make it work.