Hey all, I’ve been doing a bunch of research on selfhosting the last few weeks as I’d love to lean on more open source projects for my daily productivity & entertainment. My main goal is to backup all my personal documents, photos, and videos (around 1tb so far over ~5 years, so not too demanding) and host a few services to access files on local storage (Immich, Jellyfin) and personal (paperless-ngx, homeassistant, morss). Although I’m not afraid to mess around learning Docker, I’d like to prioritize low maintenance in balance with relatively low long-term cost so that I don’t run into an issue that takes more than a day to restore access to my files/backups. I’d rather save that time for the fun stuff, like endlessly configuring HA automations.
All that said, I figure a decent solution would be to run a local NAS in RAID 6 with a cold storage HDD to swap whenever I transfer a bunch of files from my camera for local backup, and a remote backup at either my parents’ home or maybe eventually on another friend’s NAS. The main thing I’m wondering right now is if a prebuilt NAS (Synology, Asustor, etc.) is worth it in comparison to a custom built system for simple maintenance, reliable and low-bandwidth remote backup and recovery, and solid file sharing options for friends and family? I’ve heard SFTPGo is a great project for file transfers if going custom built, so I’m not completely worried about the last point, but it’d still be a nice bonus to not have to worry about another service.
My greatest fear is having to explain to my parents what a terminal is, so I’d like something reliable with a good price which I can hopefully maintain without crossing that bridge. I know most prebuilt NAS systems aren’t as cost effective or flexible for hosting a bunch of services also, so if I did go with a prebuilt, I would probably pick up a micro PC like a NUC or an old Dell Optiplex to network with the NAS for Immich, and maybe use some internal storage to keep some movies to stream with Jellyfin (unless there’s a limitation I’m not considering). Any advice?
I would go custom and use hardware that you can re-configure and re-use in the future. If you pick up a Synology now and wind up feeling restricted by it in 2 years, it might become useless e-waste. If you have anything laying around, put that to use while you're getting your feet wet - you probably don't know what hardware configurations you'll end up wanting in a year, and you don't want to underbuy/overbuy.
You can also test self-hosting without any real hardware by spinning up a VM and passing in "fake" hard-drives to it. Try setting up a RAID6 in this fashion and see what happens. After you've played around enough you can just export all your Docker data etc onto real hardware.
I haven't used any of the prebuilt things so I'm not sure how user-friendly they are compared to normal solutions, but I'd find it hard to believe that they offer anything truly unique in terms of being accessible for normies. Assuming you're going to be the only one taking care of the NAS administration, there's likely an accessible webUI for every public service you want to offer to your friends/family.