Hey guys, I’m new to self-hosting; I’m trying to set up cloud storage to store pics and other content. However, I’m unsure whether to use my old computer, Buy NAS or ResberryPie to set up a home server.
Also, what is the best privacy-friendly OS to use with the home server?
Really depends on what you have, what you’re trying to store, etc, etc.
Like we need more info.
I’ve been running a windows desktop as my “server” for years, with a large data drive, that’s backed up by Crashplan.
It stores all our phone stuff - pictures, downloads, app Backups, etc, that get their via Syncthing and Foldersync.
I’m currently in the process of switching to a Raspberry Pi to handle a few things: Tailscale (mesh network), PiHole (for home network), Syncthing. It’s data drive (however I decide to do that, direct connected or some kind of NAS) will be backed up to a service like Backblaze B2 or something like it.
The power draw if that desktop is massive compared to the Pi. Granted the Pi lacks horsepower, but it should be fine for what I need it to do.
Sorry for the lack of clarification. I’m mainly into backing up personal and device data and the ability to add media through Plex. I’m also exploring the idea of self-hosting Bitwarden for password management, allowing access to data from anywhere through the internet. Although both Raspberry Pi and NAS are options, privacy concerns lead me to favour Raspberry Pi over NAS.
I think Pi will struggle with Plex. Maybe the latest version does it better, I’m not sure. Hit up a Pi forum or a Plex forum. I’ve seen it talked about.
There’s also mini PCs, that have real graphics, but have idle power draw of maybe 10 watts. More than idle on some Pi’s, but I believe RPi 4 idle is like 5 watts? 8 watts? I forget. Those mini PCs start around $100. They can run with a monitor or headless. You’ll see them talked about in Plex and Jellyfin forums/communities.
For everything else, you’re looking to do what I’m doing.
I just finished PiHole and Tailscale (mesh network, so all my mobile devices can now connect to home from anywhere with a transparent encrypted connection).
Bitwarden and Syncthing are next. And I’m looking to switch to dockers for this stuff.
The Raspberry Pi can work if you don’t need a lot of space or high performance. You will need an external drive or two for it. The power consumption will be very low too.
You can use an old PC if you need more drives. Just don’t use an old gaming PC since the power consumption will be rather high.
You can always just undervolt the cpu and take out the gpu. Sure, a 1000w power supply is going to be inefficient at 20% draw, but if you already have old hardware it isn’t always cost effective to replace it just because of a higher power draw.
Also the pi is great for stuff like dns and network storage, but it’s going to struggle with transcoding as a media server. I can’t speak for the 5 from personal experience, but the 4 was completely incapable as a jellyfin/plex server. I just use an old stripped down computer for media and the pi is relegated to dns adblocking.
I would still consider an 8 year old CPU to be fairly recent considering performance has only increased a couple percent per generation.
12 bit video is uncommon, so support for it is not really needed. Intel Skylake or newer will work for 8 bit H.265.
If you have any video in 10 bit H.265, you will need a Kaby Lake or newer CPU in order to decode it in hardware. Software H.265 decoding will limit it to 1 or 2 streams depending on the CPU and video quality.
Raid 5 with 3 drives survives one dying disk. Raid 1 (mirroring) with 2 disks survives one dying disk. if either setup loses two disks all the data is gone.
When you run 3 disks then the odds of two failing are higher than if you run 2 disks.
So 3 disks are not significantly safer and might even be worse.
That being said: both setups are fine for home use, because you’ve set up real backups anyway, right?
Try the pi for tinkering since it will be cheaper. If you end seeing issues with performance for the usage you need you could start looking up used laptops or optiplexes.
I had some used componentes lying around so I frankesteined a server with used parts after buying some disks
Use docker compose . Like “everyone” uses it. If the service doesn’t have a compose file, request it, or write it yourself as son as you are knowledgable enough.
Use podman as soon as people and services switch to it (you’ll know when the latest tutorials talk about podman instead of docker).
Use ngingx proxy manager or another easy to use reverse proxy.
Don’t think it’s production ready after it was working 2 days. It may be, but it’s unlikely you have enough knowledge how to fix things.
Docker and Docker compose on whatever hardware you want to start on.
Don’t think it’s production ready after it was working 2 days. It may be, but it’s unlikely you have enough knowledge how to fix things.
Most important there. You aren’t building a production system for corporate clients, you’re doing this for fun. Focus on one thing, try to get that one thing running. Toy with it, make it work. Then start on your next thing. Slowly you’ll build up a large system, but it won’t be immediate.
I personally have been working on switching from compose to kubernetes, which is way more advanced than a starter needs - but I’ve been slowly migrating for about 4 weeks now, one service at a time. Just how homelabs are done
For home use? Barely any. You can use multiple computers to spread out your load, which is nice for me because I have about 20ish containers running with differing workloads.
But I’m also a developer who needs to keep up on devops, so it’s mostly a learning thing for me. But I gotta say it’s real nice having everything laid out in a few yaml files that I can tear down and rebuild on a whim
having everything laid out in a few yaml files that I can tear down and rebuild on a whim
Oh absolutely, but for me docker compose already does that. Kubernetes might be a good learning exercise but I don’t think I need load balancing for 1 user, me, on the home network 😅
Some additional benefits also are the management of secrets. In compose you will shove them inside a .ENV file if not directly inside the compose file, while in Kubernetes you can use the secrets resource or even plug in Vault relatively easily.
Stateful storage is also better handled. Named volumes are nasty to keep track of, backup and it’s not possible to spread them across multiple devices (as in disks) while bind mounts are insecure in general. Kubernetes provides a storage abstraction which is easier to manage.
Obviously the big advantage comes when you want to run stuff on multiple devices to spread the load (or because the one box is saturated), since with compose you would need completely custom and independent setups.
Finally, I would say that running compose makes it much harder to have a monitoring stack supporting your services, since you will need to do all the plumbing for metrics endpoints yourself. And - very last - you can have admission controllers in Kubernetes that prevent certain configuration (e.g. Kyverno with a bunch of default policies), while with compose you need to manually vet every compose file and image (for example, to ensure it doesn’t run as root).
That said, compose is perfect to get started and to run stuff on one machine.
I can only speak from my personal experience. But I knew nothing about self-hosting and went with a Synology NAS over three years ago and never looked back. I essentially replaced all Google, Dropbox, Microsoft, Evernote, music/video streaming, and per-PC backup services, with one device. LOL
Yes, the initial cost up front was not cheap. Yes, the cost of getting large HDDs is not cheap. But I broke even a while ago, and I’m actually saving money by self-hosting now.
For a small pocket and low power consumption but incredible performance I would recommend the Odroid M1. Add a cheap nvme drive for the os (I prefer debian) and a 2,5" hdd. On top of debian you can install OMV for a webui based linux home server control.
DietPi is nice for beginners too.
And like other ppl already said, you can use docker/podman for running your software.
Oh and don’t forget the 3-2-1 backup rule. 3 Backups, 2 different media types (ssd, hdd, usb stick, cloud, …) and 1 offsite backup (cloud or hdd at your friend’s house).
A cheap used PC with a Ryzen 9 or something?
Ez to maintain, very power efficient, especially when idling (compared to servers, not Pi), and you get to choose the important bits (like what new enterprise level disk you gonna buy, etc) as its easier to upgrade.
And you get a lot faster CPU than duo Xenon builds in the same price range (used ofc). What you don’t get is ECC & more RAM lanes.
Also much easier to make it inaudible (or like 18~19dB?) compared to servers.
I don’t (and it depends on where you live). But R9s have been around for quite a bit, maybe try looking for a 4~5 year old 3900x (or 5900x), you get 12c/24t.
But it’s not like 7 (8c/16t) series lacks power for a home lab. Really depends on what you wanna do with it. Even a low powered Celeron is plenty for some cases.
Must not be my neck of the woods (US). You mentioned the Pi, which is in my wheelhouse of “cheap”. Personally I’ve got a couple computers picked up from the local community college for $10 running TrueNAS and Proxmox.
My Google-Fu couldn’t find an R9 3900X for under $200, just the chip, used. I had hopes you had a better source I was missing out on.
That suxs … but I was thinking 500~700 moneys. And spending some time to look/wait for a good deal. Still I think a Ryzen 3 or 5 (from 22xx onward) is a better investment especially at the beginning when you are perhaps still figuring out what to do with your home lab (and even basic things like not having your HDDs over USB lane). But you have the right idea - opportunities like those 10$ PCs is what I was talking about.
If I assume RPi 4 or 5 are at about 100 moneys (+ a decent case + maybe with an m.2 hat) - I was just trying to say that a used PC at that price offers much more. RPis are great tho, I’m glad they exist.
My RPi v1.0 (doesn’t even have the mounting holes) is piholing/sinkholing for my parents for about 10 years now.
It’s getting replaced by two servers soon-ish (main and backup - also as a second location for my servers), but I might just keep it running as a secondary device. Bcs by now it’s tradition.
Also I never got around to getting it a case so it’s just dangling by the ethernet cable all this time.
I personally think a NAS would probably be the easiest option and on top of that they are optimized for low electricity consumption, which a PC, especially when it’s older is not. It makes a huge difference because it’s running 24/7 for 356 days a year.
I used a PC once and didn’t realize that it took always about 300 W so at the end of the year surprisingly the electricity bill was much higher than normally.
It was running https://zoneminder.com/ but idling it used almost the same amount. It was a old PC my dad saved from being thrown out at his company. It must have been from around 2002 or something.
I switched from Google photos to immich just recently. I’m still looking for a good solution to replace Google’s editing features. I used, and miss, those features a LOT.
i found their site and in confused by this part of their intro page:
“That was how the idea started to grow in my head. After that, I began to find existing solutions in the self-hosting space with similar backup functionality and the performance level of the App-Which-Must-Not-Be-Named. I found that the current solutions mainly focus on the gallery-type application. However, I want a simple-to-use backup tool with a native mobile app that can view photos and videos efficiently.”
what is the main thing that separates immich from other “gallery-type applications”? wouldnt all comparable apps have some kind of gallery?
What are you comparing it with? Something like photoprism?
If so, then photo prism does not allow you to have multiple users. (Atleast it wasn’t there when I used it last time)
If you compare it with Lychee, then Lychee does not have facial recognition.
I tried Photoprism a few days ago and it still doesn’t support multiple users. It also doesn’t have an app. The Immich app is really great and it’s stupidly simple to setup auto backup of your phone camera.
Since you’re new, I’d recommend just using the old PC to start and get comfortable. Once you’re sure you want to invest some money, you can either build it buy yourself something more energy efficient if you’re super concerned about that.
As for the best OS, just any server OS will do. I run Rocky Linux which is a RHEL derivative, but you can also try TrueNas or anything else you want. Even Windows Server would work if you wanted to go that path.
There are many paths you can take, and which you go down depends heavily on personal preference and the desired use of your system.
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Go for a used small form factor PC. They usually have a decent amount of house power and can house many drives
Really depends on what you have, what you’re trying to store, etc, etc.
Like we need more info.
I’ve been running a windows desktop as my “server” for years, with a large data drive, that’s backed up by Crashplan.
It stores all our phone stuff - pictures, downloads, app Backups, etc, that get their via Syncthing and Foldersync.
I’m currently in the process of switching to a Raspberry Pi to handle a few things: Tailscale (mesh network), PiHole (for home network), Syncthing. It’s data drive (however I decide to do that, direct connected or some kind of NAS) will be backed up to a service like Backblaze B2 or something like it.
The power draw if that desktop is massive compared to the Pi. Granted the Pi lacks horsepower, but it should be fine for what I need it to do.
Sorry for the lack of clarification. I’m mainly into backing up personal and device data and the ability to add media through Plex. I’m also exploring the idea of self-hosting Bitwarden for password management, allowing access to data from anywhere through the internet. Although both Raspberry Pi and NAS are options, privacy concerns lead me to favour Raspberry Pi over NAS.
I think Pi will struggle with Plex. Maybe the latest version does it better, I’m not sure. Hit up a Pi forum or a Plex forum. I’ve seen it talked about.
There’s also mini PCs, that have real graphics, but have idle power draw of maybe 10 watts. More than idle on some Pi’s, but I believe RPi 4 idle is like 5 watts? 8 watts? I forget. Those mini PCs start around $100. They can run with a monitor or headless. You’ll see them talked about in Plex and Jellyfin forums/communities.
For everything else, you’re looking to do what I’m doing.
I just finished PiHole and Tailscale (mesh network, so all my mobile devices can now connect to home from anywhere with a transparent encrypted connection).
Bitwarden and Syncthing are next. And I’m looking to switch to dockers for this stuff.
Enabling SSH on RPi (basically you create an SSH file on the boot partition) https://pimylifeup.com/raspberry-pi-ssh/
Latest versions of RPi use nmcli command line for managing network interfaces, just an FYI.
Instructions for Tailscale on RPi https://tailscale.com/download/linux/rpi-bullseye FYI, requires a reboot after setup.
Syncthing on RPi https://pimylifeup.com/raspberry-pi-syncthing/
Here’s instructions for a PiHole Docker (I haven’t tried this, my PiHole I installed directly.) https://pimylifeup.com/pi-hole-docker/
The Raspberry Pi can work if you don’t need a lot of space or high performance. You will need an external drive or two for it. The power consumption will be very low too.
You can use an old PC if you need more drives. Just don’t use an old gaming PC since the power consumption will be rather high.
You can always just undervolt the cpu and take out the gpu. Sure, a 1000w power supply is going to be inefficient at 20% draw, but if you already have old hardware it isn’t always cost effective to replace it just because of a higher power draw.
Also the pi is great for stuff like dns and network storage, but it’s going to struggle with transcoding as a media server. I can’t speak for the 5 from personal experience, but the 4 was completely incapable as a jellyfin/plex server. I just use an old stripped down computer for media and the pi is relegated to dns adblocking.
For real time transcoding, you will need a PC with a newer CPU that supports hardware H.265 encoding.
Do you mean 12-bit? Because previous versions have been supported since 2015-2016.
I would still consider an 8 year old CPU to be fairly recent considering performance has only increased a couple percent per generation.
12 bit video is uncommon, so support for it is not really needed. Intel Skylake or newer will work for 8 bit H.265.
If you have any video in 10 bit H.265, you will need a Kaby Lake or newer CPU in order to decode it in hardware. Software H.265 decoding will limit it to 1 or 2 streams depending on the CPU and video quality.
Always remember: RAID is not a backup.
Having only one backup and the server dying means you now have no backup, therefore the 3-2-1 scheme for backups is worth looking into.
I wouldnt never do raid with only 2 disks, it doesnt seeem safe tbh, 3 disks min (2 disks as backup)
Raid 5 with 3 drives survives one dying disk. Raid 1 (mirroring) with 2 disks survives one dying disk. if either setup loses two disks all the data is gone.
When you run 3 disks then the odds of two failing are higher than if you run 2 disks.
So 3 disks are not significantly safer and might even be worse.
That being said: both setups are fine for home use, because you’ve set up real backups anyway, right?
you can use raid 1 with 3 disks gg (or 4 or 5 or 6…)
yes
Raid 1 on two drives is perfectly reasonable.
its little money vs time you spent on it (backups are almost always missing something)
Try the pi for tinkering since it will be cheaper. If you end seeing issues with performance for the usage you need you could start looking up used laptops or optiplexes.
I had some used componentes lying around so I frankesteined a server with used parts after buying some disks
deleted by creator
Do backups. Don’t forget to test if recovery works as expected.
Use docker compose . Like “everyone” uses it. If the service doesn’t have a compose file, request it, or write it yourself as son as you are knowledgable enough.
Use podman as soon as people and services switch to it (you’ll know when the latest tutorials talk about podman instead of docker).
Use ngingx proxy manager or another easy to use reverse proxy.
Don’t think it’s production ready after it was working 2 days. It may be, but it’s unlikely you have enough knowledge how to fix things.
Automatic updates.
Don’t install crap on the system.
This is a good way to get started.
Docker and Docker compose on whatever hardware you want to start on.
Most important there. You aren’t building a production system for corporate clients, you’re doing this for fun. Focus on one thing, try to get that one thing running. Toy with it, make it work. Then start on your next thing. Slowly you’ll build up a large system, but it won’t be immediate.
I personally have been working on switching from compose to kubernetes, which is way more advanced than a starter needs - but I’ve been slowly migrating for about 4 weeks now, one service at a time. Just how homelabs are done
What’s the benefit of kubernetes over docker for a home server setup?
For home use? Barely any. You can use multiple computers to spread out your load, which is nice for me because I have about 20ish containers running with differing workloads.
But I’m also a developer who needs to keep up on devops, so it’s mostly a learning thing for me. But I gotta say it’s real nice having everything laid out in a few yaml files that I can tear down and rebuild on a whim
Oh absolutely, but for me docker compose already does that. Kubernetes might be a good learning exercise but I don’t think I need load balancing for 1 user, me, on the home network 😅
Some additional benefits also are the management of secrets. In compose you will shove them inside a .ENV file if not directly inside the compose file, while in Kubernetes you can use the secrets resource or even plug in Vault relatively easily. Stateful storage is also better handled. Named volumes are nasty to keep track of, backup and it’s not possible to spread them across multiple devices (as in disks) while bind mounts are insecure in general. Kubernetes provides a storage abstraction which is easier to manage.
Obviously the big advantage comes when you want to run stuff on multiple devices to spread the load (or because the one box is saturated), since with compose you would need completely custom and independent setups.
Finally, I would say that running compose makes it much harder to have a monitoring stack supporting your services, since you will need to do all the plumbing for metrics endpoints yourself. And - very last - you can have admission controllers in Kubernetes that prevent certain configuration (e.g. Kyverno with a bunch of default policies), while with compose you need to manually vet every compose file and image (for example, to ensure it doesn’t run as root).
That said, compose is perfect to get started and to run stuff on one machine.
I can only speak from my personal experience. But I knew nothing about self-hosting and went with a Synology NAS over three years ago and never looked back. I essentially replaced all Google, Dropbox, Microsoft, Evernote, music/video streaming, and per-PC backup services, with one device. LOL
Yes, the initial cost up front was not cheap. Yes, the cost of getting large HDDs is not cheap. But I broke even a while ago, and I’m actually saving money by self-hosting now.
For a small pocket and low power consumption but incredible performance I would recommend the Odroid M1. Add a cheap nvme drive for the os (I prefer debian) and a 2,5" hdd. On top of debian you can install OMV for a webui based linux home server control. DietPi is nice for beginners too. And like other ppl already said, you can use docker/podman for running your software.
Oh and don’t forget the 3-2-1 backup rule. 3 Backups, 2 different media types (ssd, hdd, usb stick, cloud, …) and 1 offsite backup (cloud or hdd at your friend’s house).
Thank you for the info. I wasn’t aware of the 3-2-1 backup rule until now.
A cheap used PC with a Ryzen 9 or something? Ez to maintain, very power efficient, especially when idling (compared to servers, not Pi), and you get to choose the important bits (like what new enterprise level disk you gonna buy, etc) as its easier to upgrade.
And you get a lot faster CPU than duo Xenon builds in the same price range (used ofc). What you don’t get is ECC & more RAM lanes.
Also much easier to make it inaudible (or like 18~19dB?) compared to servers.
I do use a Pi-based Proxmox Backup server.
Got a link for a cheap Ryzen 9 pc?
I don’t (and it depends on where you live). But R9s have been around for quite a bit, maybe try looking for a 4~5 year old 3900x (or 5900x), you get 12c/24t.
But it’s not like 7 (8c/16t) series lacks power for a home lab. Really depends on what you wanna do with it. Even a low powered Celeron is plenty for some cases.
(I am taking about used PCs)
Must not be my neck of the woods (US). You mentioned the Pi, which is in my wheelhouse of “cheap”. Personally I’ve got a couple computers picked up from the local community college for $10 running TrueNAS and Proxmox.
My Google-Fu couldn’t find an R9 3900X for under $200, just the chip, used. I had hopes you had a better source I was missing out on.
That suxs … but I was thinking 500~700 moneys. And spending some time to look/wait for a good deal. Still I think a Ryzen 3 or 5 (from 22xx onward) is a better investment especially at the beginning when you are perhaps still figuring out what to do with your home lab (and even basic things like not having your HDDs over USB lane). But you have the right idea - opportunities like those 10$ PCs is what I was talking about.
If I assume RPi 4 or 5 are at about 100 moneys (+ a decent case + maybe with an m.2 hat) - I was just trying to say that a used PC at that price offers much more. RPis are great tho, I’m glad they exist.
My RPi3 is still kicking (Single purpose PiHole)
My RPi v1.0 (doesn’t even have the mounting holes) is piholing/sinkholing for my parents for about 10 years now.
It’s getting replaced by two servers soon-ish (main and backup - also as a second location for my servers), but I might just keep it running as a secondary device. Bcs by now it’s tradition.
Also I never got around to getting it a case so it’s just dangling by the ethernet cable all this time.
I personally think a NAS would probably be the easiest option and on top of that they are optimized for low electricity consumption, which a PC, especially when it’s older is not. It makes a huge difference because it’s running 24/7 for 356 days a year.
I used a PC once and didn’t realize that it took always about 300 W so at the end of the year surprisingly the electricity bill was much higher than normally.
Were you mining bitcoin or something?
It was running https://zoneminder.com/ but idling it used almost the same amount. It was a old PC my dad saved from being thrown out at his company. It must have been from around 2002 or something.
Yeah - that has changed since then. Power usage in the 30 to 40W range is easily attainable of you take some care selecting the components.
I bought a NUC which took 5 W idling that was quite amazing.
Yeah, those are awesome - but even with an ATX mainboard, a CPU and a few spinning disks it’s become easier to stay on this side of 40W.
Any cheap PC is going to be way better than raspberry Pi.
Also, may I suggest you to checkout Immich? I am in love with the project and have been using it as Google photos replacement.
Welcome to selfhosting!
Immich is great. Works so much better as a photo storage than Nextcloud does.
I switched from Google photos to immich just recently. I’m still looking for a good solution to replace Google’s editing features. I used, and miss, those features a LOT.
i found their site and in confused by this part of their intro page:
“That was how the idea started to grow in my head. After that, I began to find existing solutions in the self-hosting space with similar backup functionality and the performance level of the App-Which-Must-Not-Be-Named. I found that the current solutions mainly focus on the gallery-type application. However, I want a simple-to-use backup tool with a native mobile app that can view photos and videos efficiently.”
what is the main thing that separates immich from other “gallery-type applications”? wouldnt all comparable apps have some kind of gallery?
What are you comparing it with? Something like photoprism? If so, then photo prism does not allow you to have multiple users. (Atleast it wasn’t there when I used it last time)
If you compare it with Lychee, then Lychee does not have facial recognition.
I tried Photoprism a few days ago and it still doesn’t support multiple users. It also doesn’t have an app. The Immich app is really great and it’s stupidly simple to setup auto backup of your phone camera.
Since you’re new, I’d recommend just using the old PC to start and get comfortable. Once you’re sure you want to invest some money, you can either build it buy yourself something more energy efficient if you’re super concerned about that.
As for the best OS, just any server OS will do. I run Rocky Linux which is a RHEL derivative, but you can also try TrueNas or anything else you want. Even Windows Server would work if you wanted to go that path.
There are many paths you can take, and which you go down depends heavily on personal preference and the desired use of your system.
Whatever you do:
That means you’ll really understand it and how to maintain it.
And others have said: 3-2-1 backups
Still chugging along with my broken permissions ACL from my 2nd or 3rd attempt and knowledge from my Pi4.
ext with the Sticky Bit? Ah, yes, me too 🤭