Fellow DataHoarders,
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Preface: sorry this is long, but stick with me… I try to keep it light hearted. Oh and yes, the paragraph-periods are on purpose.
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I know it has been discussed multiple times in the past as to what the best locally hosted system is for hoarding and accessing data both on the local network and remotely. However, I feel things like TrueNAS, OpenCloud, Syncthing, etc are just over kill. I dabbled with Seafile in the past but then lost sight of it and now it looks to have hopped the fence with a paid version. So here is my use case…
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I recently drank the Kool-Aid on using Obsidian as a second-brain or whatever you want to call it. Basically I jumped in because I'm trying to pry myself away from Google Keep since Google decided that all things Google will add up to your data bucket on their servers and they want to charge me for it. I'm managed to float by for decades on sticking to all the "Free levels" from Dropbox, Google Drive, MS OneDrive, Box[.]com, Tresorit, etc. Never ever having needed tons of data since I only used those services for light weight stuff. Second, I was using Evernote since they came out… forgot about them, recently went back to find they want to charge a ton of money so I've already transferred all my data and closed that account.
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Now, I run my own local network, home-lab with Proxmox, Linux containers, Windows VMs, web servers, gaming servers, Plex, Jellyfin, you-name-it servers. Oh and also local A.I. servers now. But I never jumped into taking over email or storage servers. I tried email, but too much of a headache. I have a little over 50 TBs of data, spread across multiple drives and backed up routinely (essentially mirrored). I also manually backup my most important/irreplaceable things to Blu-Ray discs … like family photos/videos, things I created when I was young, anything from my past school/college/university days, and whatever movies/tv shows I will want when the zombies come.
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So without going overboard and installing a massive, all-inclusive server solution like TrueNas or that UnRAID thing… because again, I'm sticking to self-host and free… what have some of you done? Oh and I'm not looking for promotions for TrueNAS and UnRAID because YOU have a great time with them. I'm sticking to the self-hosted, open-source, free model. I've already seen tons of praise-posts for those tools.
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My perfect world thought is simple. I have a bunch of shared drives. I create a folder for an Obsidian Vault, Pictures, Movies, Files, etc. And from my PC, Android Phone, Windows, Linux, whatever… can just point the app to the shared folder on my network (from anywhere) and everything is in sync.
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Oh and yes, I have my own domains, Pi-Hole server, reverse-proxy, WireGuard VPN, and know all about managing networks, VLANs, DNS, etc. I frequently login to my home network when remote. I'm just trying to find the most simplistic method of accessing my data from anywhere and keep it all synced. Almost like just accessing a shared folder from anywhere. In Dropbox, as long as I have it installed on all my devices and point to it's designated folder on each device, everything is synced and accessible. I want to do the same… but without Dropbox running the show.
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It's OK to not have an answer. Just don't overload me with why UnRAID or TrueNas are amazing. I'm already looking into Immich for photos as well to dump Google and Amazon Photos. At any rate.. thanks for reading and commenting and I look forward to reading them all. Even if you wanna be snarky.
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Regards,
The OP. 🙂
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P.S. – As mentioned in the preface… Yes. I purposely added the periods between paragraphs so Reddit's system doesn't cram everything together like a run-off sentence. This way it maintains it's intended "letter" appearance. Peace y'all !
Source: r/DataHoarder · by /u/zentsang