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.
Start with one thing you want to do, the most important thing.
Enumerate the requirements of that thing (machine to host it on, the kind of OS it requires, network connectivity, etc).
You’re doing what I’ve always heard as “solutioning” - getting overwhelmed with potential solutions before clearly identifying the problem (e.g. Requirements).
Solve that first thing, then move on to the next thing.
Odds are you can get started with something much simpler than jumping feet first into solutions like Proxmox (which has nothing to do with your stated goals, it’s a storage/redundancy/virualization system). Forget about all that - if you eventually come to a point where you need those capabilities, you can deal with it then.
I would start with redundant local data and a cloud backup. Three local drives with data sync’d or mirrored is much easier/cheaper to get going than spending time setting up a NAS that you don’t know you need…yet.
Or, if you know you need a NAS, then start there and get that established, stable first. Then start your sailing efforts. Pretty much all NAS solutions today support some kinds of virtualization/containerization. I don’t recommend Proxmox as your start.
Edit: I’ve run different flavors of Linux on a laptop for this, with an external drive that got sync’d to a second external drive and to a third external on another laptop. That mostly protected me from local/drive/system failures, at least.
Yeah, I tend to do that and you’re probably right.
Was just talking with a coworker and maybe I’ll just start with saving images and backing them up to AWS glacier or some other cheap cloud storage. That way my data is safe in case I fuck up my setup.
After reading about proxmox, I decided to go with containers and smaller, specialized services first, as getting to know container stuff is one of my goals for a homelab.
This is some crazy good advice. In the software dev/IT fields I preach about premature optimization to my reports all the time.
You can’t optimize something that doesn’t exist. Figure out exactly what you want to build (so you want video streaming mostly it sounds like, then you can figure out how to build it (probably either a NAS or just a tower with a bunch of drives in it. And then Plex/Jellyfin). Then, after you build it, you can use it.
You’ll only find things to fix/make better by actually using it. Focus on getting the thing done, then you can optimize.