I am setting up my NAS right now, and I need some suggestions for apps that I can run on my NAS or self-host.
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I have seen some online articles, but they are too confusing because they list too many apps for each category.
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I want backup apps for iOS, Android, Mac and Windows. (It would be great if they could back up automatically).
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I want to sync my calendars and contacts.
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I want to download media like TV shows and movies. (And music, too). “Of course, only legal obtained from the internet cough.”
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I want apps that let me access my data from anywhere.
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I saw this cool thing where you could use a Raspberry Pi to access your NAS bios from your PC.
Os - Unraid
Among my must-have selfhosting items, in no particular order, I can recommend:
- Portainer, to keep track of what’s going on.
- Nginx Proxy Manager, to ensure https with valid certificate to those services I want to have available from the outside.
- Pihole, of course.
- Gitea, to store my coding stuff.
- Paperless-ngx, to store every paper in my life.
- Immich, an amazingly good replacement for Google Photos.
What do you use for scanning for paperless?
I’ve commented elsewhere on this page:
Brother ADS-1700W
Tiny,fast, scans double-sided straight to a network share. It’s the most amazing thing I’ve bought in years, literally.The printer has a web interface where you set up destinations, and I set up a file path there. Separately, on the printer itself, you can set it up to do one action automatically when it detects material in the auto sheet feeder, and I used that so it auto-scans to PDF/A and saves it on that network share.
Then I have Paperless check that path once a minute. So my workflow is literally, drop the paper in the scanner, and 5 seconds later put it in a box, then a minute later I see it in Paperless. It’s bliss.
100% agree on you list. I’d also throw in some file management solution, such as filebrowser, NFS/samba or syncthing.
You should try PhotoPrism, it’s amazing. All great picks BTW. Gittea had GH Actions compatible runners now!
I have tried Photoprism but was not as impressed by it as Immich.
Ha e you looked at dockge? I like it way more than portainer, atleast for single instance. It works with normal compose files so it keeps your stuff a lot more compatible to change and its by the guy who makes uotime kuma.
If you don’t mind, could you please check your typing? You had some obvious typos so I am not so sure of the exact name of the tool you are suggesting.
Sorry about that, my reply was from my phone and therefore terrible. Here’s the app: https://github.com/louislam/dockge
We aware that Immich breaks one week and then the other week too
Sorry but that’s not true. I have been running Immich for a long time now, and it is solid and stable.
A recent update had a change in the Docker configuration, and if you didn’t know that and just blindly upgraded, it would still run and show a helpful explanation. That’s amazing service.
What is a long time? I’ve been running it more than a year, and the number of times it broke and the amount of time I had to invest into its quite high. You may be lucky, or I may be unlucky, but I’m just explaining my experience
I would avoid self-hosting backups at the same location where your devices are currently kept. There is a reason off-site backups are a thing. So many failure causes are shared with devices in the same home, from electrical issues (lightning and technical defects among other things) over water and fire damage to theft.
That being said: backing up to a single, central, local location and then syncing those backups to some offsite location can actually be very efficient (and avoids having to spread the credentials for whatever off-site storage you use to multiple devices).
I should have written “your only backup”, obviously it can’t hurt to have both.
Will need to research it as I’m not aware of it. Thanks for the heads up.
I’d say it’s about designing a good strategy. I have local backups on my NAS and a nightly incremental backup to cloud locations from there. That way the capture from my local equipment to the NAS is lightning fast and it’s not a big deal to have it take a few hours to reach the cloud. Also having a NAS on a power backup is a must-have.
I want apps that let me access my data from anywhere
This may sound exaggerated, but paperless-ngx combined with a good network scanner will change your life. All paper mail accessible anywhere and also searchable. Plus, it is much easier to just scan something and drop it in an archive box instead of trying to figure out which folder (banking or taxes or maybe bills?) to file it in AND still remember that decision years later when you need to find it.
Brother ADS-1700W (edit: now that’s the exact model)
Tiny,fast, scans double-sided straight to a network share. It’s the most amazing thing I’ve bought in years, literally.
My printer/scanner doesn’t scan to FTP. Anyone out there shopping for a Brother Laser, step up to the MFC series that doesn’t require USB to scan, and also hardwired Ethernet. It’s only another $50 and will also include a document feeder.
Syncthing for back ups. Lovely and easy to use.
As long as it’s set to keep copies. Else it’s just a way to sync accidental file deletions.
For the downloading media part:
The *arr stack is what you’re looking for + Jellyfin for streaming (Opensource, 100% free, and much better than Plex).
Prowlarr: manage your indexers
Radarr: find/automatically download movies
Sonarr: find/automatically download tv shows
Jellyfin: streaming your media
Look up trashguides for setting up all this stuff, very detailed guides. They are compatible with torrents and Usenet. I like using docker with portainer for easy management and if you use a VPN container you can selectively route these containers through the VPN so your other services that dont require the VPN dont need to route through it.
Jellyfin for streaming (Opensource, 100% free, and much better than Plex).
*Better for your wallet and the privacy, not better in any functional way.
I’ve used both extensively and stand by my statement, from a functional standpoint as well.
That’s a bold opinion given its barebones UI, widespread playback issues, and lack of basic functionality like a proper intro skip. Like even Emby is miles ahead of Jellyfin. Which isn’t surprising given JF is free but let’s be real lol
Clearly just upset you got conned into paying hundreds for an inferior product
No I would love to switch to Jellyfin. I ditched Plex after some of their more recent shenanigans but Jellyfin is just so vastly inferior on almost every front that it’s difficult to even compare the two. For now I’m using Emby which is another fork of the same project Jellyfin is and it’s a lot closer to feature parity with Plex. And I’ll gladly pay money for a quality product over settling for a free product that doesn’t really get the job done.
I just hope that one day Jellyfin reaches a maturity that it’s actually worth switching to.
Also, privacy-wise, what do you guys use to keep your home server anonymous/hidden and protected? Is VPN enough? If yes, what VPN do you recommend?
I’m using wireguard but I hear a lot of good things about tailscale.
Totally go with Tailscale, can’t stress how nice it is.
How does it compare with a VPN?
This article explains it better than I could
It’s a mesh network, so there’s no open ports on your router. In that way it’s more secure than a VPN in my opinion. You do have to trust Tailscale themselves, but they’ve documented why that’s not a concern.
Mesh network clients on your home network make an outbound connection to their respective discovery servers (or whatever theyre calling them). Companies like Tailscale host these servers so your mesh clients can find each other.
I just discovered this and it’s awesome, if you’re into gaming at all. It’s a containerized console emulator suite, and I think it is very well done. https://github.com/linuxserver/docker-emulatorjs
You should host the internet.
I have only a few services. I could probably downscale my server.
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AdGuard DNS
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Tailscale and Zerotier
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Open Media Vault
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Jellyfin
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Uptime Kuma
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Graphana / Prometheus
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Torrent/seed box
All on Proxmox and mirrored ZFS 2 x 20TB
For backups I use FolderSync and the default backup for windows. Super lazy, but I don’t want to be the IT support of the family.
Is there some quick start templates for graphana / Prometheus? I started setting it up and it’s extremely configurable, but I feel like I have to hand craft everything.
That’s my issue with Prometheus… I want to have solid monitoring and metrics, but there’s so much setup and I feel like I’m just hosing it all up.
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Tailscale will give you encrypted access to all devices everywhere, including iOS. For any hardware that can’t run Tailscale, you can use any Tailscale client on the same network to be a subnet router - other Tailscale clients can then access that network via that client. I do this with a Raspberry Pi.
Once you have a mesh network like Tailscale setup, you can use native tools to copy files, etc, because the the mesh network provides the connection.
Checkout Syncthing and Resilio Sync. Both are great sync tools with different features. I use both, but rely primarily on Syncthing since it’s much better on memory use on Android. I use Resilio just for its on-demand sync feature.
Syncthing can also run on an Rpi. I’m pretty sure Resilio can too.
I’m 50/50 regarding tailscale; from what I heard, it’s not fully open source.
You can try out Headscale. The self hosted/open source version of it.
For accessing files from your smartphones, I know there’s Nextcloud; what other foss file management tools are available, especially on the phones?
Adguard Home or pihole is a must. Jellyfin is also pretty cool.
My personal lists:
Adguard Home Channels WireGuard for remote access (this is the only open firewall port) Firefly-iii (for personal accounting) Nextcloud for files,calendar,and contacts
There are some different way you can achieve many of these. There are like the cloud collaboration suits, and syncthing way
I want to sync my calendars and contacts
For this you can have something like nextcloud or it’s alternatives, or syncthing with decsync, or a separate caldav service
I want to download media like TV shows and movies. (And music, too). “Of course, only legal obtained from the internet cough.”
I personally use jellyfin + transmission. I’m still trying to set up *arr suite, but it’s not working, then I could use something like jellyseer. But transmission is working well anyway
Ugh, Nextcloud. It is always touted but it is such a pain to set up properly, and then it is slow as molasses.
I’ve tried, and I’ve tried the similar suite from Synology, but in the end always come back to the Google system - much as I hate to admit it, Google “just works”.
Nextcloud is literally “Jack of all trades, master of none”. It tries to do EVERYTHING, and it fails to be even decent in most of these things…
I actually like it, i’m using deck, cospend, share folders, manage some projects, send other people shares
For me it feels perfect, I don’t need to manage different services and know them in depth
Other people just need to create one account and we can do all the stuff by using our names, you know
For me nextcloud “just works”
I’m also loving Nextcloud for a simple way to do a bunch of simple things. Installing with AIO wasn’t so hard (though I plan to migrate to NixOS someday), and it introduces me to a bunch of things I can do (such as making links for shared folders with random people, no login required for them) without my having to learn a ton different specialised things.
Most of what I want to do I feel in principle there should be a better way (e.g. syncthing plus a web-frontend file server) but there’s always a weak point somewhere.
Especially that Nextcloud had decent apps for both Android and iPhone.
True, it’s a bit slow, takes most of my low-budget VPS’s memory, and doesn’t always work the way I’d like etc. but it’s great for me for now.
I’m already on nixos, so nextcloud is not a pain anymore
I’m fully agree on all the points you mentioned
I run nextcloud on a es i9 with so much ram I don’t remember how much exactly, 32 or 64
P.s. I believe the future of selfhosted cloud is based on syncthing, has some e2e encryption, and vpn integrated
I believe the future of selfhosted cloud is based on syncthing
We need some more volunteers to run relays :-)
Ed: or maybe ipv6 will solve everything one day
For me google isn’t “just works”. Very few functions in the ui, pretty slow
I use nixos, so configuration for me is not that painful. And every version it becomes faster and faster, and right now it’s pretty fast
Google oppice apps are not fast, that’s true, but they are blazingly fast compared against Nextcloud or Synology. Only Office 365 can keep up (and is functionally better) - but eh, you know.
I have a working setup with Jellyfin, Sonarr, Radarr and Jellyseer that downloads from torrents and usenet. Works quite well.
Do you use vpn?
Yes
Is it custom build NAS or something like Synology?
As already mentioned for proper backups you should locate the NAS somewhere else.
I’m not an expert by any means so don’t take my word for it. I’ve tinkerd with some pies befor but this was my proper first project: a NAS for my family (multiple households).
If it’s for personal use, you can use a VPN to your local network. It’s by far the safest option and easier to setup.
I went with OMV (openmediavault) for local sharing as OS + Docker + portainer. For the backups and access I went with Docker Nextcloud and Docker Swag (letsencrypt) and a reserve proxy with duckdns since I don’t have a fixed IP. Nextcloud setup was the easiest part and not really a hassle. With a VPN you won’t need to tinker with the “access from net” stuff.
For syncing files on Android I would recommend Autosync since it’s the most reliable one IMO. No other OS tested so far.
Nextcloud can handle a lot on its own and for something special you will find a proper plugin. For the download needs you may find some docker containers.
Custom build NAS
