Selfhosted

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.

Just a heads up on what you are getting yourself into, if you fuck up your self hosted setup badly enough there is no recovery.

That isn’t necessarily intended to scare you off from self hosting, just that the first and most important lesson to learn is to have a good system of backups that are backed up automatically, are easy to recover from, and are separated enough from other copies of the data that if something goes terribly wrong one copy will survive.

Yunohost should be the software you're looking for. Install stuff by clicking. Much less terminal stuff

https://yunohost.org/

The FUTO guide is meant for total beginners.

This post inspired me to audit my firewall rules, had put it off for too long

As someone who went through this after trumps 2nd term and power grabs i can give you my process:

1. angrily unsubscribe all big tech subscriptions
2. make a protonmail and tutamail account, realize I like proton suote more and decide to subscribe
3. transfer all passwords to proton suite
4. download all photos and other from cloud to an external drive. TURNS OUT THIS TAKES SEVERAL DAYS WTF
5. angrily order a rasp-pi and an external SSD
6. use step by step tutorials from pimylifeup to install docker and immich. Fall in love
7. gradually (via help of google and GPTs) become confident enough with command line to start managing the server headless over SSH

Fast forward 6 months: My router is now running OpenWRT. With a few necessary exceptions my network access is always through ProtonVPN. My external devices are connected via wireguard to the router when not on home wifi and only after that reach the www. I have 24/7 access to my services from everywhere. My main server is now an old office mini pc running about 10 services. Im using borg for nightly snapshots(its a bit like apple time machine) and after that everything is backed up to another server at a friends house via rsync and ssh. I have a third mini computer whose purpose is to be my tv’s UI with access to services like the national broadcasts web ui and my own jellyfin and invidious (adless youtube client) The tv does not have an internet connection anymore. I even made a custom land page that automatically opens full screen in a browser when open my tv.

The point is: this builds gradually and you have fun doing it. …until it breaks :D The most painful parts involved networking so you can settle for LAN only at first to keep things simple

If you have systems or services you're dependant so strongly, always have an backup / emergency access. 3rd party or self hosted.

My 5c but I think you agree.

Point being as a decades old it professional I see design more important as the detail implementation.

I'm 100% self taught & was in exactly the same place. I'd never used Linux before I got my first Pi. I spent a bit of time trying to familiarise myself with & made some notes regarding command line (notes I still rely on).

There'a so many ways to achieve the goal, you'll eventually find a way that works for you. My personal preference was Docker/Docker Compose deployed via Portainer.

Even that was confusing. Until I found this excellent video on how to read Docker requirements & apply them step by step into Portainer. He explains slowly & methodically exactly what he is doing & why.

Portainer is a method of handling Docker stacks/containers via a web UI. Both Docker & Portainer are simple to install.

It's easier to use Docker Compose files and/or .env (environment variable) files (both are even simpler to deploy through Portainer) but this video taught me what was going on & gave me confidence to have a go. What attracted me to Docker is you can easily remove stacks/containers if/when you make a mess rather than wiping the drive & start again, which is how I went about things initially.

This gave me the tools to set up Nginx Proxy Manager & I never looked back.

As you've realised, a robust backup solution is essential (plus off site backup for particularly important stuff) as things will inevitably go wrong along the way (I see Borg, Restic mentioned often, I went for Kopia).

I can't recommend highly enough making detailed notes along the way, I rely on Joplin.

If you start using Docker, dont fall into the trap of using the "latest" tag. If you know the version number you're running its far easier to re-deploy if an update is bad.

Enjoy your new time consuming, teeth gnashingly frustrating ...and yet rewarding hobby 👍

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.

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.

You seem to imply you also want to selfhost some email service. But that's sadly one of the few things that will always be better at a trusted third party email provider.

Besides that it seems the most important thing you want is pure data storage, and that kind of selfhosting is not hard. In many cases one would not even consider it as part of "selfhosting" as it can be as simple as a local NAS or external HDD.

So my question is what do you actually want to accomplish? Because I think for a lot of your concerns you don't even need to go and host something.

While YUNO is a great way to get started, I strongly encourage you to understand basic concepts, like docker, and maybe try to run something outside of it for fun. While not even remotely the same thing since YUNO is just the OS and "app store", you would be very similarly tied to that ecosystem the same way you are to Google now. Not to mean that YUNO would have any control over your stuff, but you would be dependent on them for what you can self host.

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.

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.

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.

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 really wish people would realize the level of dependency, and thus leverage, these companies have encouraged us to give them, before they learn it first hand.

Use DietPi, it's a great OS