Selfhosted

The FUTO guide is meant for total beginners.

As the result of a single misconfigured security setting on my Android, I was locked out of my Google Account on my phone AND all of my PCs.

Just a heads up on what you are getting yourself into, if you fuck up your self hosted setup badly enough there is no recovery.

That isn’t necessarily intended to scare you off from self hosting, just that the first and most important lesson to learn is to have a good system of backups that are backed up automatically, are easy to recover from, and are separated enough from other copies of the data that if something goes terribly wrong one copy will survive.

A single misconfigured thing can suck real bad as you've seen.
Selfhosting involves lots of things that can be misconfigured or go bad.

That's not to scare you out of it out anything, merely to congratulate you in seeking knowledge first.

Disclaimer: I'm biased towards networks because I'm a network engineer, opinions may differ.

I would say... having at least a vague grasp of layers 1-4 of the traditional network model is a decent start.
You don't need to understand everything, but knowing a minimum will help a lot imho.

It's hard to point you in the right direction without knowing what you already know or not.

Yunohost should be the software you're looking for. Install stuff by clicking. Much less terminal stuff

https://yunohost.org/

Honestly? Don't do the whole switch, or even a big switch from a few services to another.

Start small. Very small. Try doing just one service you rely on, like your images or music. Immich just announced their first stable release. I use navidrome for my music. Make sure to test these on a copy of your data, not your actual data.

Once you've got one service working as you want it to do, then you can try your hand at another service. This way, you don't get stuck trying to do everything all at once.

It may be worth considering how much (if any) you want to spend at the start, too. That'll inform your next immediate task; setting up basic backups for your data. A spare drive is a good start, but it may be worth keeping another one at your parents house, or similar.

since you're so new to self hosting, don't open anything up to the internet. You're in for a world of pain if you do.

If you have systems or services you're dependant so strongly, always have an backup / emergency access. 3rd party or self hosted.

My 5c but I think you agree.

Point being as a decades old it professional I see design more important as the detail implementation.

As someone who went through this after trumps 2nd term and power grabs i can give you my process:

1. angrily unsubscribe all big tech subscriptions
2. make a protonmail and tutamail account, realize I like proton suote more and decide to subscribe
3. transfer all passwords to proton suite
4. download all photos and other from cloud to an external drive. TURNS OUT THIS TAKES SEVERAL DAYS WTF
5. angrily order a rasp-pi and an external SSD
6. use step by step tutorials from pimylifeup to install docker and immich. Fall in love
7. gradually (via help of google and GPTs) become confident enough with command line to start managing the server headless over SSH

Fast forward 6 months: My router is now running OpenWRT. With a few necessary exceptions my network access is always through ProtonVPN. My external devices are connected via wireguard to the router when not on home wifi and only after that reach the www. I have 24/7 access to my services from everywhere. My main server is now an old office mini pc running about 10 services. Im using borg for nightly snapshots(its a bit like apple time machine) and after that everything is backed up to another server at a friends house via rsync and ssh. I have a third mini computer whose purpose is to be my tv’s UI with access to services like the national broadcasts web ui and my own jellyfin and invidious (adless youtube client) The tv does not have an internet connection anymore. I even made a custom land page that automatically opens full screen in a browser when open my tv.

The point is: this builds gradually and you have fun doing it. …until it breaks :D The most painful parts involved networking so you can settle for LAN only at first to keep things simple

If you want to start cheap, I can recommend you to use an old notebook. In my opinion it's the perfect home server for beginners.

• It's cheap (most people have an unused laying around anyway)
• If it's old enough to still have a dvd drive, you can replace it with a second sata ssd. There are cheap frames for this available.
• it has a battery, so it can shutdown if there is a power outage
• It's slim. You can just throw it on your closet and forget about it

Most services don't need much. So it's just fine if your "server" is like 10 years old. My first notebook server had 2 cores and 4 GB ram and it run Proxmox with like 10 lxc containers just fine.

You seem to imply you also want to selfhost some email service. But that's sadly one of the few things that will always be better at a trusted third party email provider.

Besides that it seems the most important thing you want is pure data storage, and that kind of selfhosting is not hard. In many cases one would not even consider it as part of "selfhosting" as it can be as simple as a local NAS or external HDD.

So my question is what do you actually want to accomplish? Because I think for a lot of your concerns you don't even need to go and host something.

I will probably get flogged by this answer but here it goes:

I'd throw you right into the deep end: get a spare machine (an old laptop or PC) and install proxmox on it. Play around, breaks shit, delete the container/VM and start over.

Grab stuff from the Community Helper Scripts and see new stuff, try alternatives, see what works for you and don't be afraid of breaking stuff.

It takes a bit longer and some basic concepts might fly over your head, but the stuff you learn like this, you learn by heart.

It's been a few years since I started tinkering with a laptop with a busted video output circuit. Now I serve NextCloud and Immich to my family, keep receipts and documents neatly organised on Paperless, have a decent arr stack and a bunch of extra goodies. All from "a PC without video? Might as well make a server" now with a proper machine with several drives on ZFS pools, health checks and redundancy.

Its a helluva rabbit hole.

Write things down

You will break something - and that's good, it's the best way to learn - but you'll want to make a note of what you did / went wrong / how you fixed it.

Future you will still break things and be grateful that you wrote that thing down

You'll buy something and find next year it was the wrong thing (too small, too large, too old, too new), so just get second hand stuff until you know what you need.

Cabled networks are so much better than wireless, but then you'll need switches and cables and shelves and stuff... so using today's wifi is fine, but know where you're heading.

You need to store you stuff - that'll be in a NAS

You need something to run services on - that'll be your server

These might be the same physical metal lump (your 2nd laptop?), they might be separate... play around, break something and work out what feels right for you... and then put your data on there

... and that'll break too.

Just be aware... if sync files between devices. That's not a backup. (Consider you've deleted / corrupted something - it's now replicated everywhere)

Having a NAS with 10 drives in a RAID6 array, is not a backup. It's just really robust against a drive failure, but a deleted file is still a deleted file.

Take a full copy of your data off your system - then restore it somewhere else.

Did it work? If so, that's a backup.

I really wish people would realize the level of dependency, and thus leverage, these companies have encouraged us to give them, before they learn it first hand.

Use DietPi, it's a great OS

I wanna say thank you for making this post OP. I've got a spare laptop that I want to try to turn into my own cloud server but I find the endeavour similarly hard as well. I'll be looking at the tips in the comments. Good luck OP!

I had something similar happen with Google a few years ago. Even though I had my password and access to my email they decided I was trying to hack my own account and locked me out. Like you I immediately started to look for other solutions.

Syncthing file sharing is really easy to install and use. There are no ports to configure on your router and everything is encrypted in transit. I have my phone's DCIM directory set up to sync to my home server and PC so new photos are backed up and available everywhere in a few seconds. I installed Syncthing intending to move to another solution eventually, but it works so well (aside from one or two files that occasionally don't sync) that I've just stuck with it.

For passwords Keepass & KeepassXC work really well on just about every platform. I share the password file using Syncthing and in years of doing this I've never had a problem that I didn't cause myself and those were minor.

You can get both of these up and running with very little effort and quickly limit your reliance on Google, then move to other solutions if you find they'd work better for you.

I'm fairly technical but I honestly don't know where to begin either. Also trying to improve our personal security to an extent.

Hope you get some answers

Damn, that's scary indeed! First of all, congratulations on your resolve to take control of your data. You have a long journey ahead of you, but don't be discouraged, take one step at a time and don't be afraid to ask for help.

As for where to start, I think you've already figured it out yourself: invest some time in learning the basics of networking. You don't need to become an enterprise-level networking wizard, just learn the basics: learn what an IP address is, what a network mask is (sometimes also referred to as "prefix length"), what DNS is and does, how to change these settings on your home network and why you'd want to change them. Try stuff, break it, fix it, repeat. Also, if you're not familiar with or already using it, it might be a good opportunity to pick up Linux. If you're coming from Windows, a beginner friendly distribution like Linux Mint will do nicely. Try installing it on an old computer to see what it's like, poke at it until you're comfortable, then maybe make it your main operating system. Knowing Linux basics (command-line shenanigans in particular) will give you a big edge when you decide to start hosting your own services.

This post inspired me to audit my firewall rules, had put it off for too long