UPDATE: To everyone who suggested YUNO, thank you so much. This seems like it is about to make my journey much easier. It is basically almost exactly what I was looking for, but I was unaware that it existed.
Thank you ALL for your suggestions, actually. It’s a bit overwhelming for an almost complete noobie but I an going to look into all of the suggestions in time. I just saw that there were several mentions of YUNO so I decided to make that one of the first things I investigated.
So, about two months ago, I had a very eye opening experience. As the result of a single misconfigured security setting on my Android, I was locked out of my Google Account on my phone AND all of my PCs. I had no access whatsoever to Google, or any of the literally hundreds of services that I get through Google.
This is when I realized that I relied entirely on Google/Android because those two days were actually very difficult, being cut off from media, services, passwords, everything, from the past almost twenty years of my life, could be taken away from me in an instant. The decades of my life that were locked away in my Google Account included hundreds of thousands of pictures, almost a hundred thousand audio tracks, several hundred books, several hundred apps, thousands of videos, etc. ad infinitum. Unfortunately, very little of this material was backed up at that point. That is my fault. Also, the misconfigured security setting was my fault as well.
The amount of data, media, memories, services, etc. that would have been lost is actually endless and it would have affected my life in several ridiculously negative ways.
Luckily, in the end, I was able to get my access back and then basically immediately grabbed all of the several terabytes of information and media of mine that they had, and that I was almost locked out of. I have it all in my house now on a drive in my computer, with a backup made on another disconnected disk.
I then decided that no corporation was ever going to have such an insanely high level of influence on and control over my entire life and my media ever again. That experience was actually very scary.
I’ve been trying to get into SelfHosting, but am finding it quite daunting and difficult.
There is a LOT of stuff that I have to learn, and I am mostly unsure of where to even begin. I know basically nothing about networking.
I need to learn the very basic stuff and work my way up from there, but everything that I’ve seen on the Internet assumes that the reader already has a basic to intermediate understanding of networking and the subjects that surround it. I do not, but I am going to learn.
I just need someone to show me where to start.
Thanks in advance for any assistance!
The FUTO guide is meant for total beginners.
Thank you! I will begin to look over it tomorrow!
I am a sysadmin with over 30 years of experience managing servers and networks for businesses of all sizes as well as for myself, friends, and family.
The FUTO guide is extremely detailed, accurate, and accessible. It does not always follow best practices, and it’s not a comprehensive guide to all of the possibilities for self-hosting. It’s not trying to be. It is a guide for someone with no technical expertise (but with basic technical ability) to degoogle/deapple themselves at a reasonable level of cost and effort.
You do not have to do everything in the list, you can pick and choose the parts you’re interested in. That said, I would recommend reading through the whole article as you have time, because it does a very good job of explaining the concepts involved in building a self-hosted setup, and understanding how everything works is the biggest step toward being able to effectively troubleshoot problems when they inevitably crop up.
If you have specific questions about things that aren’t answered in the guide or via a quick web search, post them here.
Thanks for the detailed explanation! I will definitely begin studying the document tomorrow!
Love the explanation. I’ve had a homelab for 20 years now and have never heard of FUTO. You’re explainer has made me bookmark the site now for future skimming.
This, so much. I remember when Louis told everyone about it, people (mostly Reddit) were so nitpicky over every minor detail.
I’d be curious seeing the discussion. Its healthy to have respectful competing opinions and see what rises to the top
It was a while ago, I don’t remember much of it unfortunately. Only the idiots.
I didn’t know I needed this. Thanks!
They use OpenVPN for some reason. Wireguard is superior in every way. In case you set up a VPN.
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A single misconfigured thing can suck real bad as you’ve seen.
Selfhosting involves lots of things that can be misconfigured or go bad.That’s not to scare you out of it out anything, merely to congratulate you in seeking knowledge first.
Disclaimer: I’m biased towards networks because I’m a network engineer, opinions may differ.
I would say… having at least a vague grasp of layers 1-4 of the traditional network model is a decent start.
You don’t need to understand everything, but knowing a minimum will help a lot imho.It’s hard to point you in the right direction without knowing what you already know or not.
Plus, if you end up accidentally locking yourself out of your own system: boot access means root access (Secure your IPMI/iDRAC, folks!)
Yeah. I guess that is true. The part about not being able to point me in the right direction. I have a shaky grasp of several network protocols and things of that nature. Nothing deeper than surface level at this point.
Hello again, thanks again for the great advice. I have a question though. The traditional network model that you mention…is that also sometimes reffered to as the OSI Model? Are the two the same thing? I just want to make sure that I am studying the correct thing.
Yea, I was referring to the OSI model.
Honestly? Don’t do the whole switch, or even a big switch from a few services to another.
Start small. Very small. Try doing just one service you rely on, like your images or music. Immich just announced their first stable release. I use navidrome for my music. Make sure to test these on a copy of your data, not your actual data.
Once you’ve got one service working as you want it to do, then you can try your hand at another service. This way, you don’t get stuck trying to do everything all at once.
It may be worth considering how much (if any) you want to spend at the start, too. That’ll inform your next immediate task; setting up basic backups for your data. A spare drive is a good start, but it may be worth keeping another one at your parents house, or similar.
That is exactly my plan, to have this set as a long term goal with several incremental micro-goals, as opposed to attempting to do it all in a weekend. I figure making it a long term thing gives me much more of a chance to actually learn what it is that I am doing. Plus, at my level (no real networking knowledge to speak of) trying to do this in a weekend sounds like a nightmare, lol.
since you’re so new to self hosting, don’t open anything up to the internet. You’re in for a world of pain if you do.
I will probably get flogged by this answer but here it goes:
I’d throw you right into the deep end: get a spare machine (an old laptop or PC) and install proxmox on it. Play around, breaks shit, delete the container/VM and start over.
Grab stuff from the Community Helper Scripts and see new stuff, try alternatives, see what works for you and don’t be afraid of breaking stuff.
It takes a bit longer and some basic concepts might fly over your head, but the stuff you learn like this, you learn by heart.
It’s been a few years since I started tinkering with a laptop with a busted video output circuit. Now I serve NextCloud and Immich to my family, keep receipts and documents neatly organised on Paperless, have a decent arr stack and a bunch of extra goodies. All from “a PC without video? Might as well make a server” now with a proper machine with several drives on ZFS pools, health checks and redundancy.
Its a helluva rabbit hole.
I was unaware that those Community Helper Scripts existed! They should definitely be helpful at some point down the road!
Good luck!
Isn’t that how everyone does it? 😬
I had something similar happen with Google a few years ago. Even though I had my password and access to my email they decided I was trying to hack my own account and locked me out. Like you I immediately started to look for other solutions.
Syncthing file sharing is really easy to install and use. There are no ports to configure on your router and everything is encrypted in transit. I have my phone’s DCIM directory set up to sync to my home server and PC so new photos are backed up and available everywhere in a few seconds. I installed Syncthing intending to move to another solution eventually, but it works so well (aside from one or two files that occasionally don’t sync) that I’ve just stuck with it.
For passwords Keepass & KeepassXC work really well on just about every platform. I share the password file using Syncthing and in years of doing this I’ve never had a problem that I didn’t cause myself and those were minor.
You can get both of these up and running with very little effort and quickly limit your reliance on Google, then move to other solutions if you find they’d work better for you.
In the time since this happened, I have set up KeePassXC on all of my PCs as well as KeePassDX on my phone, and taken all of my passwords 100% out of Chrome.
I’ll absolutely look into SyncThing! I’ve heard of it many times, I just haven’t used it myself yet.
Thanks for the info!
Syncthing is incredible. I use it on my devices, and everything is also backed up to my NAS.
Second this, Syncthing rocks. Only ever have rare, minor problems in day-to-day use
I’m about 90% decoupled from Google, it’s been a journey.
I’m at the difficult stage of contemplating how to decom my gmail email, and the Google account itself.
I’ll throw my hat in the ring and offer any help if you need it. Similar to others here, I suggest you start with something discrete like photos.
I’m at the difficult stage of contemplating how to decom my gmail email, and the Google account itself.
I have a couple of domains at OVH, and for the last few years I’ve been using email aliases when making accounts, all redirecting to my Gmail. The other day I had enough, created a mailbox on one of the domains, changed all aliases to this new address, and installed Thunderbird mobile. So far it’s been going well.
The webmail runs roundcube, which is usable but not great. The biggest problem I’ve had is the inability to create automatic filters.Edit: forgot about the calendar, I’ve moved that to my Nextcloud instance
I moved my calendar to Nextcloud, then radicale. My contacts too. Gmail is just a wean away.
My problem is how I’ll be able to deal with work apps like ms authentication. Even if I set up a 2nd “normal” phone for work only, I need to sign in to the play store to get the app… Its a chicken-and-egg problem.
@non_burglar @Damage Are they just TOTP authentication codes you need? If so, you there’s alternatives
I’m fairly technical but I honestly don’t know where to begin either. Also trying to improve our personal security to an extent.
Hope you get some answers
Thanks! I hope you do, as well!
I wanna say thank you for making this post OP. I’ve got a spare laptop that I want to try to turn into my own cloud server but I find the endeavour similarly hard as well. I’ll be looking at the tips in the comments. Good luck OP!
Good luck to you, as well friendly stranger!
Damn, that’s scary indeed! First of all, congratulations on your resolve to take control of your data. You have a long journey ahead of you, but don’t be discouraged, take one step at a time and don’t be afraid to ask for help.
As for where to start, I think you’ve already figured it out yourself: invest some time in learning the basics of networking. You don’t need to become an enterprise-level networking wizard, just learn the basics: learn what an IP address is, what a network mask is (sometimes also referred to as “prefix length”), what DNS is and does, how to change these settings on your home network and why you’d want to change them. Try stuff, break it, fix it, repeat. Also, if you’re not familiar with or already using it, it might be a good opportunity to pick up Linux. If you’re coming from Windows, a beginner friendly distribution like Linux Mint will do nicely. Try installing it on an old computer to see what it’s like, poke at it until you’re comfortable, then maybe make it your main operating system. Knowing Linux basics (command-line shenanigans in particular) will give you a big edge when you decide to start hosting your own services.
I’m not very familiar at all with Linux. I have used a few distros here and there where the majority of the work is done in a GUI. The CLI intimidates me, hahaha. I began exploring distros through WSL a little while back. I still haven’t “dove in” yet though.
As far as the networking terms that you used, I have at least a slight grasp on all of that and what the different network “components” do, but I do not yet know how to implement or configure most of the things that you mentioned.
There’s a GitHub repo called awesome self hosted. I would get the link but I’m mobile. It has a pretty exhaustive list of self hosted software with a link to their page. Might be worth loooking at.
edit: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted
This is an area where AI can be helpful. Tell the AI what Linux distro your on and what you want to do. Most of the time it will give you pretty good answer. If you don’t understand what it is telling you to do, ask it to explain the thing in detail. Most important thing though is to always verify what it tells you before you run stuff. Google search specific commands or use the “man” command to get documentation. The key thing is the AI can make you aware of CLI commands and tools more easily then trying to find what you need on your own.
Thanks! That is good advice and I will begin doing that to try to familiarize myself with the CLI.
Write things down
You will break something - and that’s good, it’s the best way to learn - but you’ll want to make a note of what you did / went wrong / how you fixed it.
Future you will still break things and be grateful that you wrote that thing down
You’ll buy something and find next year it was the wrong thing (too small, too large, too old, too new), so just get second hand stuff until you know what you need.
Cabled networks are so much better than wireless, but then you’ll need switches and cables and shelves and stuff… so using today’s wifi is fine, but know where you’re heading.
You need to store you stuff - that’ll be in a NAS
You need something to run services on - that’ll be your server
These might be the same physical metal lump (your 2nd laptop?), they might be separate… play around, break something and work out what feels right for you… and then put your data on there
… and that’ll break too.
Just be aware… if sync files between devices. That’s not a backup. (Consider you’ve deleted / corrupted something - it’s now replicated everywhere)
Having a NAS with 10 drives in a RAID6 array, is not a backup. It’s just really robust against a drive failure, but a deleted file is still a deleted file.
Take a full copy of your data off your system - then restore it somewhere else.
Did it work? If so, that’s a backup.
Thanks for the advice. I am using Trilium to create a knowledge base as I go, and I am keeping meticulous notes on my progress, successes and failures.
I’ve always struggles with practicing restoring backups. Do you have to buy an identical 2nd machine to see if everything still works w/o messing up the first one?
Not really.
I keep my data backups (docs, photos, etc) separate from the OS backups.
So, depending on what you’re using to do the backup, often they can just simulate a restore and just check the backup’s not corrupted. Not really a restore, but at least you know it’s not trash.
If you’ve backed up your data with a simple copy / sync (ie not a “backup” program), then you can restore your data somewhere else (maybe even jist a part of it) and do a compare.
But, yeah, if you’re restoring the OS, then it might be ok restoring it in a VM to check it…
I’m slowly moving towards no OS backups and using Ansible to be able to recreate the system(s) from scratch… of course I need to backup the ansible files too 😉
I would like to backup and test restore app configs not sure how to do that yet :p
Maybe OS backup is the way somehow. Maybe I need an atomic distro …
Well, it depends on the app & how it’s installed.
Most bare-metal installed apps are in
/etc/or~/.config/… maybe under/opt/or/usr/- just copying those files out on a regular basis is usually good enough.Might be a little more tricky if you’re trying to backup a database / live files, but those apps usually have some documentation about backups.
If it’s a container or flatpak, etc. then it’s probably somewhere obscure.
Use DietPi, it’s a great OS
I don’t currently have a RPi or any SBC though.
If you want to start cheap, I can recommend you to use an old notebook. In my opinion it’s the perfect home server for beginners.
- It’s cheap (most people have an unused laying around anyway)
- If it’s old enough to still have a dvd drive, you can replace it with a second sata ssd. There are cheap frames for this available.
- it has a battery, so it can shutdown if there is a power outage
- It’s slim. You can just throw it on your closet and forget about it
Most services don’t need much. So it’s just fine if your “server” is like 10 years old. My first notebook server had 2 cores and 4 GB ram and it run Proxmox with like 10 lxc containers just fine.
In addition to what another poster said about getting an off-site backup hard drive, I would recommend looking into setting up a raid array for data redundancy with your online storage. You don’t want one hard drive failure to make all of your data inaccessible.
Yikes. Before you dip into any of the self-hosting, take and get a WD Gold drive - from Western Digital directly (wd.com) - do NOT go through Amazon or NewEgg or any third party merchant. Send in the warranty that goes with it and register the drive (this is for covering the off chance it’s a DOA unit) Then get a good quality enclosure to pop the drive into and take your time and back up EVERYTHING onto that new HD.
Don’t use an SSD.
You want a spinning platter drive, as this is backup only, so once it’s full with all of your content, it gets dated and labeled and popped into a drawer for safe keeping. If you have countless terabytes of data, get more drives and swap them into the enclosure, date and incrementally fill. A fine tip sharpie to note what’s on the drive is fine, or if you’re obsessively anal about it, make a spreadsheet with that info… If your drives are kept dry and stored with care they will last for DECADES…
The truth if being honest here - I’m a data hoarder and most of the stuff I’ve tucked away since I first came online (in 1999) is now on drives that I maybe spin up once a year. I used to have the notion that it was critical that all my shit was accessible all the time and I ended up dropping money on networked storage… and over time, realized that as long as I knew where the files were, DID have the most important stuff - family photos and scans - tucked away not only in long term storage, but on multiple drives in multiple machines, (home, work, laptop) it was okay not have it served up instantly.
Just reading your post made me go cold inside - I can only imagine what you were going through until it got sorted. From a bonafide old school data hoarder… Please, back your shit up locally. Use enterprise drives.
Then sort a self-hosting soultion.
Several detailed, easy to understand and very good pieces of advice! Thank you! I have definitely saved your comment for referencing throughout this process!
Which software do you use for backups?
I do my backups manually.
As I have run unsuported Mac installs for the last 20 years, I started a long time ago, automatically partitioning my OS drives and making storage volumes to work off of.
The storage volume in the computer will have subfolders for the type of data - music, video, photos, etc.
When my storage volumes fill, I will pull my latest backup drive out of storage, hook it up then go into each storage subfolder, sort by date and add everything that’s newer than what’s in the backup drive. (which is actually how Apple’s Time Machine backups work - incrementally sorted by date - but I’ve had this method since the start, so I just stuck with it)
I just make sure to take note of how many files/folders I’m adding to the backup drive and note what it has at the start, then at the end, as a double-check of it all, before I clear the storage drive on the computer. (I did not do this and lost almost a years worth of music rips, waay back in 2003. Rebuilt the music I lost then iTunes threw a wobbler and lost the library for me. FML…)
The longest backup will ALWAYS be the initial one if you’re dealing with a first time backup. The rest, once you work out how to organize your files, is academic.
What I’ve found is that your tastes will change, you grab content you think you’ll want to hold onto forever… and then years later, you realize it’s low-bitrate, low-resolution, too pixellated… whatever… and you decide to delete it.
With the software doing the backups for you - it’s too easy to just let it rip and go have dinner while it works and you end up with files that you’d otherwise get rid of. Part of being a data hoarder is not keeping everything forever. There’s a ton of garbage online. Tastes change as you get older… You want to curate that shit so you can keep what’s most important - like family stuff.
And really good porn.
