Hi all
I’m going to set up a little server on a pretty old Mac Mini, with an external RAID 1 enclosure. It’s initially got two main purposes - to run an Immich server to backup my photos when I’m away travelling, and to give me something to learn about Linux and self-hosting on. I used Linux a bit back in the day, but I’ve been living the lazy Mac life for years. I’d really like to transition out of the Mac ecosystem eventually, so this is an initial toe in the water towards that aim.
I’m planning on running Debian, for stability and compatibility, and backing up to a separate NAS that already exists, so that I’m not completely screwed if (definitely when) I mess something up. It’ll all be set up in my power/internet access point shed, so I’d prefer it to be fully remote access, no screen/DE.
It seems like I’ll be running Immich in Docker, and that I’ll need Tailscale/Wireguard for my remote connection. Does this seem like a decent initial plan? Are there any decent resources for learning this that you’d recommend? I already own the hardware, and all my photos are safe on SD card, SSD, and local backup, so there’s no real consequence to me messing about with this. Any advice/thoughts would be welcome
Ta
Nextcloud certainly can be a cumbersome beast. I’m glad it’s the second thing I chose to selfhost instead of something much later on. Gave me a chance to get my feet wet with it. I’m a big fan, but I think if I’d started with smaller services I’d be upset about the breadth of the project. It is absolutely trying to do everything it can, which can be good or bad depending on your use case.
Nextcloud was not my first selfhosted thing, I was paying a service provider for it when I started self hosting everything else I was already frustrated with how nextcloud did not play well with my homelab so I thought why the heck am I paying for it. I have never had good luck with Nextcloud.
Is there anything inherently wrong with Nextcloud? I have been running it for years for some simple file backup stuff and never really thought twice about it. I was going to be trying to backing up all my iCloud photos and cancelling that plan so I’m glad I stumbled into this chat haha.
I am just really not a fan of it, I think it tries to do to much and does not do any of them well. You can setup seperate services for each thing that does just that one thing.
I have a bunch of pi 5’s running a bunch of services that replace all the Nextcloud things and much much more, I have a pi 4 running HAOS that backs up to one of my pi 5’s, and a pi 0 2 running cowrie. On top of that I have a Flint 2 running with a vanilla OpenWRT running a VPN and many vLANs, than I have a VPS that runs age encrypted backups and a few other small things off site.
Immich is what I used to get outside of iCloud, I do not remember if I ever used Nextcloud for photos. The reason I mentioned a few of the things in my homelab is to say that I have all the services and more to replace Nextcloud, while still keeping back ups with better security than Nextcloud.
I have almost degoogled all the way, I still have an account for youtube so that Google is. I have almost de-appled, I still have a iphone for another year and an ipad for some time longer. Why do I mention this? Same reason why I mentioned me not going through basic Nextcloud things, the Google and Apple do not touch my stuff. I have a finally tuned pihole setup to block more of Google and other trackers, I use searXNG to avoid Google to search the web. Why do I mention this? Do you use a hosted or a self hosted Nextcloud instance, if it is hosted there are likely trackers that see everything going in and out if it is self hosted and you do not have strong encryption there maybe trackers.
Sure a selling point of a hosted Nextcloud is encryption but there are ways around it let it be, brute force or social engineering.