Selfhosted

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!

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.

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 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

At first, you have to decide what do you need. You can selfhost almost everything, but in my opinion there is no need to do so.

Second thing is hardware to host it. I saw a few comments recommending NAS. It is of course good thing, but my suggestion is just building your own NAS. You need only decent computer to do it.

The easiest way is just installing TrueNAS on it - with that you can setup file sharing and your apps via docker.

But what apps would you need/want? I can recommend a few from my stack:

• vaultwarden - for storing passwords, 2FA codes
• immich - for storing photos, videos, autoupload from phone
• adguard - for getting rid of ads, tracking They are really easy to deploy.

As an alternative to file shares via SMB, nextcloud is really good option. It’s google drive on steroids. Also includes photo gallery with great app on android/ios with autoupload option.

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.

@MTZ saving this for later! I aim to go the same path soon :)

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.

Start with a nas, the rest will naturally come when you try to access your data for outside, or organize your data, or save more data types to your nas.

Your nas should be the central device and you build the rest around it.

Now, The question is, which nas? I would recommend synology, they are not too performance, a bit expensive and the company is lately doing suspicious moves, but the sw and the hw are rock solid and they are quite good for beginners from almost all angles. Extra point for how many howtos and tutorials are present in internet.

Once you are comfortable with them, you will realize the rest

if it seems daunting, which it is!, maybe it would be a good piont to ask yourself if you really need to run a server and these self hosted web apps in the first place. i did for about 10 years but i realised at some point i didnt need half of it.

if youre planning on having multiple users or want to share one of the services (like real time editing of files or passwords etc) then thats where self hosted stuff makes sense to me, but if not then syncthing can do a lot without needing any complicated setup

keepass is a good example. or note taking apps like jopin or obsidian where the data is store in plain text and where you can choose where the data is stored works great with syncthing

for about a year before i did any self hosted stuff i was running only syncthing on my laptop and phone without any server so its do-able and you can get started right now and worry about getting a server later.

tailscale is a huge help as well and is very easy to setup. say you repurpose an old laptop as a server for now and install whatever services on it, jellyfin for example, you will only be able to access that when you are on your home network but not when you are away, and thats where tailscale comes in. as long as its installed on each device you should be able to connect to your apps/services from anywhere.

basically you can start small and then over the coming months and years as you learn more you will get more confident about moving onto more complicated setups

Unless you have experience with ethernet equipment and such it is probably better to start with some hosted service of an open-source app like Nextcloud or Immich or (slightly more advanced) a VPS somewhere. Doing it immediately from home with your own server has a steep learning curve.

Hi @MTZ , #selfhosting could be a move in the right direction for you. I started managing my own servers over 10 years ago, locally, from my home, later VPS and finally again from my home. Eventually I moved toward @yunohost - it simplifies a lot of things! I documented some my experiences at https://wasi.ovh/
Start small: setup file/photo sync (@nextcloud), calendars and contacts and gradually start adding data from old backups once you feel comfortable.
Have fun and good luck :)

Instead of self hosting, why not try better offerings?

Most anything you probably use Google for, you can do with a disroot account. Riseup is a great group, with many similar services (not all). The tildeverse also has myriad replacement services.

Just try to support them, financially.

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.

Install Virtualbox (or some software to handle virtual machines).
Install Debian (or some other OS of your choice, I won't judge if you prefer Windows).
Update your OS (apt update && apt upgrade -y on Debian).
Take a snapshot of your VM's current state after updating. Saves a lot of time if you mess up or want a clean slate.

Now you decide on what you want. Do you want to install n8n or Node-RED for automation? Do you want to use Immich for pictures? Paperless to save papers in a digital format? Audiobookshelf to listen on your books or podcasts? Jellyfin to stream your media? Set up a Minecraft or Factorio server?

Once you have decided on what you want to do, try to do it in your virtual machine.
Once you understand how to set it up and configure it to your liking, decide on how you want to host it. I took an office computer, added a few HDDs and replaced the case with a bigger one and it's now my home server, but any old laptop will do. Just make sure to take backups.

I used to have a Dell R710 and a virtual machine for each service I hosted, but I have moved to docker because it as simple as taking the often provided compose file, tweaking it a bit (where to store data etc) and running it with docker compose up -d.

What exactly do you want to do? Just have storage that you upload all your media to, which is also backed up somewhere else?