Most people realize too late that they didn’t have backups of their data or don’t realize they can easily setup their own media servers at home. What do you use and suggest? Everything from beginner tech knowledge to advance. TIA
- Pictures: On a folder on a server I syncthing to. I don’t really look at them. I used to have NextCloud for browsing them, but it was slow. I might give Immich a try
- Music: Youtube and the songs in my head. Sad, but it’s true. I have a large collection I rarely look at. I also have a rockbox I sometimes pick up and play to rejig my tastes.
- Movies/Tv shows: Kimcartoon was main goto for cartoons, but it’s down now. I use other sites. Movies, usually I find some recommendation on Lemmy and then I go find a nice DCC on an irc server somewhere with irssi. I had JellyFin for a bit, but I just don’t watch movies or series that often.
- Backups: Some in the cloud. Rest in a big old hard drive. Plug it in once a year, update and tidy it up. Power down, back into cold storage.
My setup is simple:
- Pictures: I don’t take many and rarely look at them tbh. So they just sit on my laptops NVMe
- Music: I only ever use cmus for listening to music => Therefore music is also only locally on my laptop, managed with beets
- Movies/Tv Shows: I have jellyfin running on a raspberry Pi 4. For single user use this works fine (even transcoding DVD quality works). For multi user or higher resolution transcoding this probably won’t work.
- Backups: One off-site backup at a cloud storage provider using restic and one backup on a USB hdd I simply plug in every other week.
My recommendation is: Keep it as simple as possible. In the past I created the craziest setups, but it turns out that in every day life I have neither the time nor motivation to maintain that shit.
I’ve got a beginner 2 bay NAS set up with about 18TB for all my family’s media.
Pictures from our phones are also backed up in Google Photos. Not private at all but it works as an off site option.
OWC Express 4M2 with four 8TB m.2 chips raided for 24TB of lightning fast storage for media. And a Synology DS1522+ with expansion bay for 96TB of storage for backups plus more media (plex library to stream to home theater). Additional backups to 8TB SSDs for the builtin storage of my main machine. This is somewhat excessive, not what I recommend for most users, but definitely right for my use.
Everyone should have minimum two backups. Ideally three with one of them being offsite in case of disaster such as fire.
Offsite backup is not optional for anything important. It’s worth paying for AWS or literally any other online storage solution for that copy. You don’t want a natural disaster to lead to the loss of all your life’s photos for example.
I also personally don’t recommend doing your own software for anything related to backups, you can’t test edge cases easily and it could easily lead to loss of data. I once used an app that attempted to manage its own backups delete it’s online backup when it lost its local data as it attempted to back up the blank local data.
My home server has an NVMe that has the OS and all the Docker Compose stacks and their database data. The big data (photos, movies, backups, etc) are on a big 6 drive RAID 6 array. The NVMe gets backed up to the RAID every night. They go into folders named after the day of the week, so I’ve always got 7 days worth. Then every week or so, I rsync the whole RAID to a big drive at my parent’s house. The reason I do that manually is because I don’t want it happening if I get hit with a ransomware attack.
That was all relatively easy to set up, but server administration is also my profession, so for normal people, I recommend an easier home server setup and a commercial backup solution.
I’m actually working on an open source backup solution based on my deduplicating WebDAV server, Nephele. If I can pull it off, it’ll be free and open source to run on your own hardware, or you can pay my company to back up to my hardware.
