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!
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.
Thanks for the advice. Currently, I have a backup of all of my important data on a high capacity HDD that is completely disconnected from any devices. There is no real way to automate backups with that setup, but it’s what I am working with at the moment.
To piggy back off of Arcayne’s comment
I’d recommend setting your sights on the 3-2-1 rule. 3 copies of your data, 2 different mediums, 1 off-site. Hetzner Storage Box is a good cheap offsite option.
I don’t backup everything to a 3-2-1. I at least have everything on a 2-1 backup scheme. Two copies, one offline. My personal photos and videos are on a proper 3-2-1. I can redownload my movies and music. I can’t retake pictures from my childhood. It saves a lot of money doing it that way. My personal media is less than 1 TB, whereas my whole collection is many TB and would be prohibitively expensive to 3-2-1.
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!
This, so much. I remember when Louis told everyone about it, people (mostly Reddit) were so nitpicky over every minor detail.
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.
They use OpenVPN for some reason. Wireguard is superior in every way. In case you set up a VPN.
I didn’t know I needed this. Thanks!
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As someone who went through this after trumps 2nd term and power grabs i can give you my process:
- angrily unsubscribe all big tech subscriptions
- make a protonmail and tutamail account, realize I like proton suote more and decide to subscribe
- transfer all passwords to proton suite
- download all photos and other from cloud to an external drive. TURNS OUT THIS TAKES SEVERAL DAYS WTF
- angrily order a rasp-pi and an external SSD
- use step by step tutorials from pimylifeup to install docker and immich. Fall in love
- 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
Re-investing in a new platform full of tools (Proton suite) isn’t in my opinion a rational answer. My answer is self host vaultwarden, self host your file storage, and choose between Proton and Tuta for mail, and use your own domain name so you can take your email address with you should you move.
In my opinion No-one should ever store any form of personal data implicitly on someone else’s computer.
Oh i have vaultwarden as well nowadays
how well does invidious work on the TV? how easy are the controls?
I use a small wireless logitech keyboard-mousepad so it works very well. I had to make exceptions in the router for googles video severs to bypass the vpn though.
yeah not all invidiouses allow proxying the video, and at some it used to be off by default
Im running my own instance. But yeah, videos from google servers won’t load behind a proxy. Or they might work for a while but then wont and then you have to switch vpn servers which is very annoying.
When you’re connecting to your local network, say from outside your home, you connect through proton vpn? I’m wanting to self host, but I thought I would have to switch between proton and whatever VPN the local machine is using? Say immich for instance
My phone is on a wireguard tunnel into my router which puts my wireguard vpn in the same forewall zone as my home LAN. Internet access is routed through the tunnel and then through another tunnel to protonvpn and from there to the www. It was a bit elaborate to set up but it works. Wouldnt really recommend the setup for everyone, it was a bit of a pain in the ass to get working. I used Openwrt and policy based routimg plus wireguard for the tunnels into and put of the router.
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.
Goddamned inflation. It used to be just 2 cents worth!
Ah crap that’s what I get for not being native English. But still, correct somehow.
I don’t believe inflation is a serious problem. But that is just my 9 cents.
Indeed, I do agree but I’ve never done anything close to this magnitude so it is kind of intimidating for me. It is a learning process though!
I’d recommend not to go containerized but that can start a flame war. I would think it easier. But best to stick to the recommended beginner tutorial that someone else posted and go along from there.
Then ask questions on the way.
I hard agree with this. I would NEVER have wanted to start with containerized setups. I know how I am, I would have given up before I made it past the second LXC. Starting as a generalized 1 server does everything and then learning as you go is so much better for beginnings. Worst case scenario is they can run docker as the later on containerized setup and migrate to it. Or they can do what I did, start with a single server setup, moved everything onto a few drives a few years later once I was comfortable with how it is, nuked the main server and installed proxmox, and hate life learning how it works for 2 or 3 weeks.
Do i regret that change? No way in hell, but theres also no way I would recommend a fully compartmentalized or containerized setup to someone just starting out. It adds so many layers of complexity.
Thanks, you put it better than I can.
Native vs containerized really depends on what it is going to be doing tbh. If it’s just downloading and/or moving files around, containerized is fine. And having your docker-compose.yml files saved somewhere external will make future hardware upgrades/recovery much easier.
There is certainly some learning curve to figure out the quirks of a compose file, but the nice part is that most services will post an example compose file for you to edit as needed. And that means learning it is basically just a matter of reading the example files and figuring out what the different fields mean; yaml is extremely easy to read, even for someone who has never looked at it before. You may have some fringe cases that need a deeper dive, but the vast majority of setups are basically just a matter of “copy the example compose, edit the volumes as needed, and fuckin send it.”
Yes indeed. However as a beginner I think it’s far easier just to install and run a daemon. But maybe that’s just me. And of course if the intended way of running it is only container by default.
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 👍
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.
I don’t want to replace email, per se. More so, the services that come along with it. Stuff like photo storage and sync, notes and reminder sync, calendar sync, and a lot of the hundreds of other small things that I have just been leaving up to Google that would cause a huge problem for me if I lost access.
I have the password situation handled with KeePassXC on my PCs and KeePassDX on my phone, but that’s about as far as I have come as of yet.
Keepass is a great way of password management, I use keepass as well. I also use syncthing to sync my password database across all devices and then I have the server acting as the “always on” device so I have access to all passwords at all times. Works amazing because syncthing can also be setup so when a file is modified by another device, it makes a backup of the original file and moves it to a dedicated folder (with retention settings so you can have them cleaned every so often). Life is so much easier.
For photo access you can look into immich, its a little more of an advanced setup but, I have immich looking at my photos folder in syncthing on the server, and using that location as the source. This allows me to use one directory for both photo hosting and backup/sync
Note taking? Joplin. It’s been amazing for me and replaced Evernote after they started with their BS.
Photo storage. Been using Photo prism but I’m open to a better one.
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.
Yes, I’m definitely trying to understand the “why” of what it is that I am doing. I’m just going to be using YUNO as a starting point.
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.
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!
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.
Yeah, it was dumb. I should have thought about it long before what occured, but I didn’t. But, in the end, I definitely learned my lesson.
You’re not dumb, we are all being brainwashed into sticking our asses in the air and convinced we won’t get fucked.
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
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.
Right, forgot about the contacts, those are on Nextcloud as well. What’s the advantage of radicale over NC?
I still run the play store, but I get what I can from F-Droid. I’m not familiar with the MS authentication app, but I use Ente Auth, idk if that’s comparable.
What’s the advantage of radicale over NC?
Functionally, they work the same. I got kinda tired of fixing NC every other upgrade, though. It was always some “occ add missing indices” or some similar garbage. Like just solve this, already. Make that part of the upgrade.
Hmmm, luckily I haven’t had issues so far, but I’m using the AIO docker container
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
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 -yon 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.It’s a great idea to run it in a VM first, because I’m bound to make mistakes along the way. Awesome advice! I’m definitely going to be referencing your comment throughout the process! Saved!
I had a Raspberry Pi once and wanted to move file from the current folder to some other folder. I typed
mv /* /path/to/folder/and move everything in the root directory and down to this other folder.EDIT: Meant to say that snapshots are cheap backups. I ended up reinstalled the OS.
Correct would have been dot slash:
mv ./* /path/to/folder/
Backup. I use Backblaze personal which is $179 for two years of ‘unlimited’ storage. All my important self hosted data is duped to some old 2.5" external drives connected to my work machine that then is backing up to Backblaze. I also have 1yr retention, so any deleted file is accessible for up to 1yr.
After backups are sorted, stick with the OS you know best. If Windows (I hope not), then HyperV for VMs is good. Try the official Nextcloud VM from Hanson IT. Nextcloud is a good catch-all, but it’s beaten by other specific tools. I now host all I need from specific Docker containers: photos, calendar, email backup etc etc
But I would say Docker. Docker desktop if Macos or Windows if your thing. Get to know docker and the world of self hosting is your oyster.
As what others say, keep it all to your home network and tread carefully when trying to remote access it all.
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I can’t quite figure out the downvotes to my first reply for suggesting backups and docker… I think my mention of Windows did it (do please avoid Windows for what it’s worth).
If you have reliable, easy to access backups, then it takes away the doubt of self-hosting. Hence the suggestion for Backblaze as it’s so easy to implement. Put in an encryption key and your remote data is private. I use it for everything except Plex media, which is something I wouldn’t care if I lost.
I jumped to Unraid about 2 years ago and haven’t looked back. Docker on Unraid is as easy to use as it gets, and now my confidence with it has grown and my demands are getting slightly more complex, I’m moving to Dockge for Docker stacks, and Pangolin on a Hetzner VPS for remote access. Hetzner have a great firewall feature for your VPS, so you can lock it down to home access to get you started once you start on a VPS journey.
But I would recommend Unraid for sure on ANY old HP desktop PC from eBay. I got an Z1 i9-9900, 32Gb RAM for £250. Bonkers cheap for what it is.
Good luck!
