Hello all, i know this seems like a stupid question to ask in this community, but i am serious.
To me: i am generally comfortable around computers, tried a few simple projects (like a music streamer based on a rpi) but i have no real education on this - all i do is follow the documentation and then google for troubleshooting. I am also (kinda) privacy focused and really annoyed at all the enshittification observable everywhere so i installed revanced and about half a year ago when i bought a new laptop i set my old thinkpad up as a proxmox-server. This is running my HomeAssistant-Instance in one VM and has another VM running ubuntu for my docker containers (paperless-ngx and immich). I really like the services these provide, but to be honest i feel uncomfortable with entrusting my data to them, as i am constantly worried i will break something and corrupt the data. Also i think i underestimated the amount of updates and maintenance that accumulates.
I am also not really willing to spend too much time learning all this from the ground up, as my dayjob is 8h in front of the computer anyway, so i dont want to spend my whole evening or weekend there as well.
I guess what i am really searching for is a service which i can just trust and pay for myself OR a very userfriendly suite of selfhosted apps.
Services i need would be:

  • general cloud storage
  • document organization (a la paperless-ngx)
  • photos

I would also like:

  • some kind of shared notes
  • a media suite (like plex)

I am fine with Home Assistant, as that has no real consequences should i really mess it up badly

Thank you for any suggestions on how to move on in this matter.

  • litron3000@feddit.orgOPEnglish
    1·
    5 days ago

    thank you
    that still leaves the part about all the hassle of maintaining every service on its own though

    • pe1uca@lemmy.pe1uca.devEnglish
      1·
      4 days ago

      I’m assuming you mean updating every service, right?
      If you don’t need anything new from a service you can just stay on the version you use for as long as you like as long as your services are not public.
      You could just install tailscale and connect everything inside the tailnet.
      From there you’ll just need to update tailscale and probably your firewall, docker, and OS, or when any of the services you use receives a security update.

      I’ve lagged behind several versions of immich because I don’t have time to monitor the updates and handle the breaking changes, so I just use a version until I have free time.
      Then it’s just an afternoon of reading through the breaking changes, updating the docker file and config, and running docker compose pull && docker compose up -d.
      In theory there could be issues in here, that’s were your backups come into place, but I’ve never had any issues.

      The rest of the 20+ services I have are just running there, because I don’t need anything new from them. Or I can just mindlessly run the same compose commands to update them.

      There was only one or two times I had to actually go into some kind of emergency mode because a service suddenly broke and I had to spend a day or two figuring out what happened.

      • litron3000@feddit.orgOPEnglish
        1·
        4 days ago

        Yes updating is part of it, but at least on my current setup (using just the old laptop with limited storage) it often includes stuff like extending the partition for a VM. I understand that this is probably not a problem, when using a NAS with several TB of storage though
        The thing is I don’t want to invest in one of those while I am still unsure about which route to go.
        Also stiff like connecting to a service from outside my home network isn’t configured right now due to security concerns (stemming from the actually very little knowledge I have setting all this stuff up). I will look into tailscale though, maybe having this feature will give me a motivation boost :D

    • kata1yst@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1·
      5 days ago

      Maintenance is easier than you think. I “maintain” 40+ services by simply automatically updating them. And if that makes one stop working (very rare) I get an alert and fix it when I get time.

      I use ansible for that, though you could more easily accomplish much the same with Watchtower.