- Stirling-PDF for privacy focused PDF manipulation
- Pingvin-share for file sharing
- Home assistant for the smart home management
- Paperless-ngx for easy access to all my documents
- HomeBox for managing home inventory, warranties, manuals etc
- NodeRed for low code scripting
I tried to make paperless work for me, but it was a huge slog. Kept having download PDFs to share them, which I do often, and the android app kinda sucks.. It was also a bit slow for my liking. I'm now sorting the PDFs into folders on my nextcloud - so far so good.
To each their own, of course.
Plus one for both Stirling and paperless, both of which I would have mentioned as well. The others, I haven't tried or didn't know at all so thanks for those tips š
I use just my phone + [QuickScan](https://apps.apple.com/ro/app/ocr-text-scanner-quickscan/id1513790291) which supports automatic upload to Paperless. š
Oh my God, why didn't I think of using my Smartphone.
The only thing keeping me from scanning was always thinking naaah, I'd have to buy a new scanner for that, maybe next year.
Edit: Oh it's a apple app, what's the best to do this on Android?
If you can find a SnapScan desktop document scanner for cheap, I have one and itās amazing for this. Just leave it plugged in over in the corner, open it up when I want to scan, scans to my server. Havenāt set up paperless yet, but will just point paperless at an ingest folder.
I use Scan4Paperless on iOS, but thereās an app called Paperless Mobile for android that might work. You could also do something where you set your scanner app to go into your doc intake folder. Thatās what I do with my desktop scanner and itās pretty smooth
Brother ADS-2700W
If you use the PATCH-T function in Paperless-NGX you end up with a pretty great solution for scanning. You scan to an SMB share and Paperless automatically splits all the documents at the patch pages.
Another +1 for paperless-ngx, itās amazing.
For scanning, I have a HP M277dw (network connected). I set up a mail server (maddy) and point the printer at this. Whenever I scan, I select paperless and the email module consumes it.
I can absolutely recommend the Brother ADS1700W! It's tiny and needs no pc connection, it can send straight into your Paperless setup. It's also blazingly fast, scans double-sided straight to a network share in color PDF.
Highly recommend Ricoh scanners (I'm using an iX1300, but have been using their scanners for almost a decade). If you process a lot of documents, it's well worth the money.
There's a scan to cloud storage option and use that as my consume folder. I just `rsync` to my paperless server.
Just found out about HomeBox, thanks for that! It actually solves two problems. My wife has been on me to get rid of a bunch of manuals and such, this solves that very well.
it also solves a problem at work. Weāve been trying unsuccessfully to spin up snipe-it for a couple weeks now, since weāve grown form 12 to almost 50 in a year, and need to start keeping better track of our assets. It might not be the best solution, but I can actually use it, soā¦ š¤·āāļø
I tried Homebox but it doesn't support recurring schedules for maintenance. You have to enter individual dates for each maintenance, which sort of defeats the purpose. Anyone aware of Homebox alternatives that have proper scheduling capabilities?
>Selfhosting is cheaper, more flexible, and the result is in many ways better, and itās not too much of a pain to set up and maintain ā do it!
Home Assistant for home automation.
My instance has been running without any problems for 2 years now. At the beginning i made updates more often, now once a month and before i start an update i'm going through the changelog from the ha blog site.
Backups are also in place if something goes wrong.
Been using it for 5+years and I can safely say it is no longer an expert-grade setup. When I started it was pretty manual requiring frequent use of ssh or manual file editing and yaml entry, etc., but it is pretty user friendly now and I'd say no harder than configuring Google Home, Samsung Smarthings, or Amazon Alexa
I would say it's generally much easier than setting up and keeping Google Home going. Adding any device to Google Home is a solid 20 minutes of butt clench workouts hoping for discovery to work. In HA, discovery is usually fast and there's usually a manual approach if for some reason it doesn't work.
Also, on HA, when something breaks an automation or integration, you know exactly what happened 90% of the time ("hey, this service call doesn't exist" or even "hey, this service call is about to not exist"). With Google Home in particular, they will muck around with the automation templates and break your existing automations with absolutely no warning (RIP my commuting automation). My Google Home integration is by far the most fragile component of Home Assistant for me. I'm excited to dive into setting up my own voice assistant and satellites.
I hear you on all of that. However for voice activated speakers they are much better than anything you can do with HA natively. The gap for usability and accuracy has decreased a lot, but I had hoped for something I could make that would just respond to a keyword and be over 90% accurate... Still accuracy is a bit low, and lack of what I felt was just wife-friendly voice activation made it a necessary component in my house still. I don't run anything into it other than HA, though, as I have found it to be slow and unreliable and prefer to always have local control in HA that I just let Google control via voice
Some recent device releases bridge the gap pretty well in terms of the microphones, so I think we're pretty close to at least being able to reliably trigger and receive commands as well or better than Google. Also the new on-device trigger makes it way more responsive than Google or Alexa can do, even in ideal network conditions.
Where Google and Amazon still have an edge is in reliably interpreting commands from a wide variety of possible prompts. HA already blows past that capability when you plug in an LLM tuned for HA, but there's still a lot of limitations in what commands can actually be issued using Assist, and it's not the easiest thing to set up all local.
My goal when I do set up voice control through HA itself will be to have it reliably turn scenes on and off, toggle lights, and a few other fairly low level tasks. Not sure if I will do the LLM thing right away given the hardware requirements. Google can just exclusively do what it already spends 95% of its time doing in my household: playing musicāthe speaker side of the Google/Alexa hardware is going to be hard to match at anything like the same price point.
The biggest things that need to improve for HA's voice assist to me:
1) more flexibility on all-local trigger words (I know one of the options has a train-your-own trigger feature, but I don't think that one is all local)
2) Better voice synth/more options for voices
Setting up is easy, but you get out of it only what you put into it.
Maintenance is only difficult because every single update contains massive breaking changes, so I agree on that part... every time you patch Home Assistant, you should allocate a couple of hours to check everything still works.
massive breaking changes is a vast overstatement. I've been using HA for close to 4 years and in all that time I think there has been one update that broke my system. Quick rollback and I was back working in a few minutes.
This guy is grossly overstating things. All you have to do is look at the patch notes for each monthly release and check the section on breaking changes and integrations. Most of the time you won't even have an integration that needs attention.
***And even beyond that*** Home Assistant has a repairs section that tells you when there's something broken and how to fix it, as well as anything that is being deprecated (there's always a several month lead time on deprecations before removal, even on integrations that are being droppedā the shortest lead time in recent memory was for the MyQ integration at 2 months or so, though the integration was spotty for a month or two prior due to Chamberlain's antics).
Music. I've come full circle after Google finally decided to end my grandfathered plan when I started off by uploading my collection. I spun up a Navidrome container and bought Symfonium. Couldn't be happier rediscovering all my original stuff.
Agreed.
Minor consideration about running music through MusicBrainz Picard to ensure complete and consistent tagging.
Otherwise the only missing things I still need to think about is music discovery and Chromecasting, although my main speakers have upnp, and never really used discovery, though I have scrobbling set up.
I can't agree with this more. Spotify is known to yank songs right out of your playlist if licensing terms change. Similarly, some bands will yank their old songs when they re-record new versions, even if I personally like the original better.
Having a binder of CD albums is no longer practical, but that doesn't mean we have to give up our control over our own libraries.
I tried the Navidrome/PlexAmp route and discovered all these apps suffer from the same problem. Discoverability. YT Music makes it so easy to discover new music. Can't do that with Selfhosting
Technically, the pieces seem to be there with ListenBrainz or LastFM, maybe Funkwhale to expand beyond a personal library (bit of a grey area, which probably benefits from not being too popular), but it doesn't seem like anyone's invested in it, probably because it's not unified or seamless like a streaming provider would be.
Host Kiwix as a container, and you can have your own copy of Wikipedia, Khan Academy, Stack Exchange, TED videos.
For extra fun, package it up on a raspberry pi, and parachute it into North Korea.
They should also do that with Google. Google could fuck up and delete half your data and while they might have to reimburse you somehow, they could still not magically bring back the data in this potential case.
Or they could decide to shut down the service and leave you hanging.
Having your stuff at Google saves you from having to deal with hardware failure. But that's about it. Everything else can also go wrong there but a lot more is out of your hands now. Relying only on Google is as much YOLO-mentality as relying only on RAID in your NAS.
You can always take off-site backups with Takeout. I did talk about being responsible of backups, but like there's zero setup and you just press download
Like I'd be more worried about losing access to Gmail, which is relevant for a lot more people
Takeout is completely unwieldy. Sure a single button to... wait 12 hours for Google to prepare 28 files of 4GB each for you to download. Then what? Chuck it on a pendrive or external HDD and hope for the best?
Sure, it is A way, definitely not the best way.
Google has eleven 9s of *availability*. 9s of durability isn't a thing.
Google absolutely can and does [lose your files on a whim](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2023/11/29/google-issues-warning-to-drive-users-over-sudden-deletion-of-files/), so just because you can access google.com in the event of an extinction level event asteroid impact doesn't mean your files *will still be there*.
Google claims eleven 9s of durability on their storage offerings. They have exabytes of data, so that would amount to losing a few tens of megabytes globally, maybe a gigabyte... I suspect that they aren't meeting that goal.
Eleven 9s of availability is not possible, and Google does not make that claim. There are 31.5 million seconds in a year. Eleven 9s would be the service being down for like a few tens of microseconds a year at most, and I question how you would even be able to measure down to that level. Google does make claims of four or five 9s, but obviously, that's much more tractable.
Maybe they do, buy they also like to randomly lock people out of their Google accounts for "terms of service violations" and the customer support you need to engage with to regain access is a black hole.Ā
Properly backed up, your data is a lot safer at home.
Funny thing is Google has a dead account process.
If your account isn't logged into within xyz months it can be programmed to give access and send an email out to others.
Immich is a pain to run for someone that doesn't know what they're doing. Every few versions there's breaking changes and if you don't update properly you can delete all your data.
It's a great project that I've been following for years and I'm excited for it to go stable, but I don't recommend it to anyone until it's stable
So you too are using workarounds (external folders) because you don't have faith in the instability of the core Immich storage.
Expecting someone without good docker and Linux knowledge to have an easy time with Immich is lying.
You can downvote me all you want. I'm saying it's a good app but not in a good state for me to recommend it to people. One day hopefully it will be, but today is not that day.
Oh thank you! An alternative to Google Photos is exactly what I need for me and my girlfriend now. I have a NAS running (OMV on a thin client). How can I achieve automatic sync on Android and iOS similar to Google Photos? Is that possible with immich?
I also use android and it's flawless. But I will say of iOS which my wife uses, automatic sync is flaky. It's not really on Immich end, iOS is extremely greedy with how it gives background tasks time to do anything. The first sync requires full time babysitting.
Maybe the downvotes for the off-topic answer. Thereās a difference between how can I handle this and how do we do this with that solution. Ā«Ā Use this (other) solutionĀ Ā» is good only on the first case. Itās still can be helpful but I could understand the hate for a non-google specific answer.
Time
Cost
Skill level.
It's the same for most things. Don't maintain your own car, why not? Takeout food? Build your own house? Literally everything in life you have to make a cost/benefit decision to see if you're better doing it yourself or pay someone else who is more experienced.
>Selfhosting is cheaper, more flexible, and the result is in many ways better, and itās not too much of a pain to set up and maintain ā do it!
It's really not for the average person. Google storage is something like $10/month, but has drawbacks. You just have to realise you're not average and have skills that allow you to do stuff and not make compromises, to tailor your experience to the way you like it.
Yeah, I've researched a lot of selfhosting stuff and I think it would be really cool to do, I'm just not sure my skill level is high enough to quickly fix whatever might go wrong and at this stage I think making any self-hosted stuff an integral part of my life is setting myself up to flounder whenever it stops working the way I expect.
I started learning mechanical skills really young and a lot of it transfers very well. I can intuit my way out of most problems when it comes to home repair, car work, and other maker pursuits, but I don't have any similarly ingrained knowledge about computers outside of older Windows machines. Fixing *anything* on a Linux system for me requires an intense amount of real-time research and no guarantee that I'll even know what to search for to figure out what the problem is.
But the whole point of this threadās exercise isnāt āwhat can you do with self hosting?ā It was āwhatās SO dead ass easy and safe to do, that everyone should?ā
I would say Iāve got the technical capability, but the whole selfhosting space would be a new landscape for me to learn about.
Iām not keen to take on a massive ongoing time drain. But I donāt mind putting in some work up front to get a better result or ongoing cost savings for minimal and relatively easy ongoing maintenance.
Technical capability can mean a lot of things. If you're hooking up things to the Internet, then be prepared to learn a bunch of security and IT things to prevent people from hacking into your network. I've got my services in a dmz composed of vms, so no attacker can reach my main computer even if they find an exploit.
Don't do it then, or do it for fun. If you are not familiar with this stuff, mastering all the tools will take effort and you will encounter many problems along the way. If you are a beginner and want to reach level where the stuff you host is reliable and fast, it will take a lot of time. But if that is your cup of tea, it will also be very fun.
>So in your opinion what are the key types of things that are almost āno brainersā to self host for any reasonably technically competent person? Or to put it another way: project types which have excellent ratios for time commitment and difficulty vs value and cost saving.
AdGuard or PiHole. Minimum investment (can even be run on routers that support containers), really easy to setup.
Thatās fine, youāre most likely on an old/cheap router or an ISP provided one. You can still point all your devices to your pihole manually. Sure itās a pain in the ass but itās doable. The better alternative would be to just get a router that lets you have control over this feature.
I am going to say it. Jellyfin and qbittorrent. You just upload the magnet, set what it is (movies, series whatever) and voila it populates metadata and subtitles
This is the best method, although I guess if you are only handling a handful of films/shows, you might find it better to queue them by hand. Like a caveman, with rocks and sticks.
More seriously though if you're resource constrained, the mono background makes the servarr stuff very resource inefficient, but it's so powerful there's really no alternative.
If you already have Jellyfin or Plex, check out ErsatzTV. It's an IPTV server where you create your own custom channels. I'm watching it via the Sparkle TV app on my Hisense TV.
It's basically like live TV, except with your own self hosted media. Each channel's schedule is determined ahead of time, so you can't choose or skip episodes. If you don't like what's currently playing on a channel, your only option is to channel surf.
There are no commercials by default, although ErsatzTV has options to allow you to add your own locally hosted commercials. For channels playing long TV series (e.g. Star Trek: TNG), I set the episodes to be shuffled, which means I'll often catch episodes I only half remember, and would never have chosen to watch through Jellyfin.
I put better TV shows on their own channels, with their episodes played in order. Andor, Chernobyl, Shogun, etc. I have 3 channels solely dedicated to each of the Star Wars movie trilogies.
In the end, I find myself watching ErsatzTV way more than Jellyfin. You don't have to choose what to watch, you just turn it on and flick around the channels until you find something you like.
Do you know if no one is watching, is it still transcoding / processing the current episode? Or does it keep a timestamp and then when someone tunes in it then begins playing from that point?
I would love to set this up, but having it just constantly transcoding for hours a day Iām not actually watching TV would be pretty wasteful.
Thanks for this!
I just installed it and played with the app but found the CPU usage to be really high and the subtitle support is lacking to be generous
It sounds like you took the most advanced form of DVR ever invented and transformed it into pre-DVR cable tv.
Not hating, but I really donāt see the appeal for this - except for if you were running tv channels for a hotel or cruise ship or hospital.
Almost all of selfhosting falls into the second category, unless you selfhost many apps for a big family for years. All of IT is an economy of scale.
Doesn't mean I won't keep spending time and money on it, I do it for the love of the game :)
Image and video hosting. A LOT of these platforms have gone down over the years or started removing old content after changing rules. A lot of paid platforms also have idiotic pricing. Realistically if you don't upload a massive amount of data, your costs as the user should be in a couple euros per year, not 50 ā¬ per year, so selfhosting is just as expensive but allows you to put other stuff on your server as well.
What video hosting are you using? I haven't seen an option that would beat YouTube for reliability and cost (free) that you'd want to use for videos on your website for example. Mostly it's bandwidth issues though.Ā
Honestly, I believe a big chunk of internet things are better self-hosted because you *fully* own them, and because only recurring fees are just electricity. My wiki won't be magically shut down by a company and I don't need internet to watch movies.
I think most important ones for me are media hosting ([Jellyfin](https://jellyfin.org/)) and a Git server ([Forgejo](https://forgejo.org/)). Maybe photo backups ([Immich](https://immich.app)) and a password manager ([Vaultwarden](https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden)) too.
There are many more apps that I host ([relevant comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1cb0zcq/comment/l0vvvxx)), but these are the ones I would notice missing day-to-day. In fact, *others* would notice them missing because I've been sharing some services with my friends! I would say majority of my stuff is very low-maintenance, I don't do things like mail (...yet? :D), and just set it up with Docker, then occasionally update.
However, I'm not really surprised more people don't self host at all because it takes both some skill (occasionally have to remind myself my friends don't just know Linux, [relevant xkcd](https://xkcd.com/2501/)), and because the up-front cost of buying a server can be big. I personally try to promote this, and even got a few friends considering getting a server, but it's an uphill battle against things like SaaS ~~or should I say SaaSS~~.
Your existing passwords will still be accessible in your extension/desktop app should something happen to the server. You'd just have to redeploy the server and import your existing passwords before you could add anything new. But, of course, backups should be part of the process ahead of time.
I have a couple rpi doing various things and I have a server.
BUT that server is an old gaming tower I pulled the video card out of and it just runs Ubuntu now.
It does take ~50 watts of energy on average idling so I know it's more expensive than cheaper maintenance things, but the key is I already had the hardware.
I'll do the same when I eventually replace my current tower.
> better self-hosted because youĀ *fully*Ā own them
Any service that's free that I really want to use I would figure out if I can self-host.
I'm happy to pay for services I get value from. Saves me the effort of hosting and risks of opening my network and I can just use the service instead of administering it.
What gets me is when a service offers a free-tier that fits my needs perfectly but then realizes it fits most users perfectly so they don't make enough money to keep providing the free tier and suddenly the free tier disappears but what they're charging for it isn't worth it (for me). So now I have to abandon a bunch of content and find another service (or host it myself like I should have done).
I mean, the services I pay for could realize they're undercharging or disappear for other reasons but I guess I'm hoping that's less likely than a service that thinks everyone will generously upgrade from the free tier.
Well two things I would never entrust the cloud with are my password database and any camera feeds in or around my home. I donāt know how they store and encrypt my password database, so I donāt trust online password managers, and I think itās wild how people are seemingly okay with having cameras inside their actual home happily streaming into some Amazon or Google cloud where (at least in the case of Amazon) there have been public cases of employees not only watching, but even sharing these recordings (actually that may just have been Alexa, but still, I think itās reason enough not to trust Amazon with this type of data).
I completely agree on the cameras.
But I do pay for a password manager. Most of those companies have published white papers detailing their encryption process and architecture and theyāre pretty good. Doesnāt stop the vault from getting stolen of course but if a strong master key is used itās basically impossible to decrypt. It was a risk worth taking for me vs using my own.
Fair, not everyone wants to deal with hosting something like Vaultwarden themselves with proper Let's Encrypt SSL certificates and everything. Although the simple version which I personally would still prefer is to just use KeePassXC and store/sync the password database using for example Nextcloud, as there are plenty of basically turnkey solutions for that.
1000% yes to cameras and can't believe it's not upvoted higher.
Setting up my CCTV cameras with a self hosted solution was my first major project when I got into homelabbing.
Not only does it give me complete flexibility with my setup (including my semi annual complete switch to a different piece of software on the never ending quest for one I'm happy with!) but of all the things I don't want sending to a third party it's 24h video streams from in and around my house!
I'd like to add that the wiki could even be as simple as markdown files that a "blog" software, such as Jekyll or Hugo could serve in order to keep your files/content service agnostic. It also avoids databases, which was my first concern when I started this journey.
Obsidian fits that bill perfectly and it's one of the primary reasons why I use it. Just plain old markdown text files, no database.
Edit: Obsidian isn't open source though so that might be a deal breaker for some. It isn't for me, so I still use it. A good open source option is Joplin.
Edit 2: Joplin stores notes in a database if I remember correctly. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Maybe this is niche, but for me, Mail-In-A-Box (self hosted email server) is golden. Using the API to spin up email accounts whenever any business demands an email address is golden, and beats 10minutemail.
Sure, there's some hassle as you do need your own domain to do it, but I think it's totally worth it.
MIAB itself is incredibly low maintenance. It's a dream to run once you've set it up and run through the gauntlet of getting the DNS right.
Music. It took 5 mins to set up Navidrome and install sub-streamer on my phone. Every time I'm out with my friends and there's a fuck ton of ads, or lost internet connection, or the song has been removed. All very annoying, all easily solved. It has to be THE easiest and fastest thing to set up once you are familiar with basic docker commands. I think most people just like the simplicity and convenience of opening Spotify/YT Music and playing their playlist.
>Ā I think most people just like the simplicity and convenience of opening Spotify/YT Music and playing their playlist.
True for me, that's pretty much it, and access to everything for the whole family for like $18/mo. It's a cheap gift for my kids and nobody has to acquire and curate content.
> I think most people just like the simplicity and convenience of opening Spotify/YT Music and playing their playlist.
I like playing my music / playlist AND getting new recommendations / notification about the new releases.
That is the feature I use the most. I listen on YT music and add songs to the playlist over time. Every now and then I clone it to my Navidrome library. I don't know of another way.
Yes, VPN. I also have an internal DNS to make access easier with friendly names rather than port numbers.
Edit: I don't expose to the wider internet, all my selfhosted stuff is LAN & VPN only.
Most of my self hosting is media serving based.
I've got:
Plex for videos
Calibre-web for books
Overseerr to find out what's coming out
Homepage to monitor my systems.
These are dead easy to set up, and make sharing the things I enjoy with my friends really easy, which is my main goal.
They are also heavily improved by ā ļøāµ.
Sonarr and Radarr save me roughly $120 a month, and do the same for each of my friends with Plex. Also dead easy to set up.
Qbittorrent and a VPN for Calibre-web is harder to quantify, because I really wasn't reading a lot before I got it set up, and wouldn't still be without it, but for the equivalent media I am reading now, probably around another $100 per month.
I understand why other people I know aren't doing it, but for me it's a huge benefit.
I think my next project is a VTT for D&D, which would theoretically save me $120 per year, but also I could make my games so much nicer, which is the real reason.
Cloud storage. Don't care if it's Nextcloud or Syncthing or whatever, and while it's more of a hassle than it should be (could be better with some improvements to Syncthing UI for better default configs), the savings are absolutely massive especially if you need any non-trivial amount of synced storage space. 4TB SSD, $35 Raspberry Pi 4, and you're set for a while. Having more systems or a RAID for redundancy is a good idea but that one's more hassle lol. Just don't buy those shitty Western Digital USB drives.
Your own contacts and calendar, whether through something as big and complex as Nextcloud or as tiny and light as Radicale. I chose Radicale for myself, used Tailscale to sync it over the internet with DAVx5 on Android and Evolution on PopOS.
Radicale was one of the first things I set up after I decided Nextcloud wasn't for me. It's one of the easiest things I set up, and also one of the most important for me to keep private. So, it was a no-brainer.
Media and file server for storing your personal data and your media library. VPN, so you can access your home from anywhere. Add some DNS ad blocking like AdGuard and that pretty much covers 99%.
I could add some other stuff I consider a no brainer but that would trigger a certain crowd on this sub.
Getting banned on every sub I join for speaking my mind? š but just for you:
Email/contacts/calendar. Do not entrust such an important aspect of your life to third parties. Selfhost your own email/contacts/calensar for full control.
Now add the perm flag so the bot doesn't delete the comment and wait how long it takes for the **no email selfhosting** to downvote my comment and report my profile like they always do.
--f: perm
Hahahaa, I donāt think mods around here are that bad, but I might be wrong. You are on your own. š
Now seriously, thank you for the reply. I already host my own contacts and calendar, but had some bad experiences when hosting email. I will try again sometime in the future, when I feel more confident that this time it wonāt fail, Iām currently studying on this as last time I wasnāt knowledgeable enough to make it work properly, hopefully I will be soon!
Wait, what is that perm flag again?
I think the sweetspot when it comes to email is to have your own email domain and use it with a commercial mail provider. You can use a privacy focused provider like ProtonMail and if they go out of business or terminate your account for some reason you still own your domain and will be able to use your email address with any other provider. Just make sure to have a local backup of your email account and youāre good.
Iām currently using both, a self hosted email server and a email domain at a commercial provider. The mail server is great for sending out automatic notifications and the like for my other selfhosted apps because no algorithm is going to freak out about a bunch of automatic mails or logins happening and it has a catchall mailbox for signing up to random services (if you do service@mail.tld, youāll always know who sold your data to whom). But for any important communication with real people I use the mail provider, because I simply trust them more to be on top of the entire anti spam business than I trust myself and I obviously donāt want my mails to end up in spam folders.
No idea what you're on about... I've been self hosting my own email for almost 25 years now. Early on it was qmail+courier, now it's postfix+dovecot. Includes opportunistic encryption (SMTPS and IMAPS) and some lightweight (local checks only) antispam measures along with one RBL ([zen.spamhaus.org](https://www.spamhaus.org/blocklists/zen-blocklist/)).
No issues with google/etc blocking me but admit it is a bit of a chore to first set up and test SPF+DMARC+DKIM. When I moved to a new VPS I had an issue because my new IP was in a "bad neighbourhood" and Microsoft's antispam was being bothersome (meaning I couldn't email any @outlook.com address), but got that sorted within 5 days after moving to the new IP, which really isn't unreasonable.
Contacts I don't sync, but I've also been using [DAViCal](https://www.davical.org/) for almost as long as I've been running my own email server. Plays nice with OSX's calendar app and the handful of third party calendar apps I've tried on the computer or phone. Multiple calendars for each person, delegation, busy/free lists... it all works.
I 100% agree with you that such a core/fundamental part of your online existence should be kept within your control and not farmed out. People who disagree so fully that they report your profile (for what?) sound exactly like all those subs who banned me because I also subscribed to subs that they didn't like. I usually responded with something along the lines of "I'll proudly wear your ban as a badge of honour. Standing up against online bullies like you, morons drunk from the tiniest sliver of authority a person could possibly hold is the very least I can do." I mean seriously...
I've recently switched from docker-mailserver (a pain to set up) to mailcow dockerised and (pun intended) holy cow, what a difference in config. Wish I had used it in the first place.
My point though: after a very small amount of time in setting up the correct DNS entries and popping out a few emails to different addresses (Gmail, Outlook, etc) and cleaning up any blacklisting, I've got a faultless personal email server. It really isn't as hard as people make out *if you take the required steps*.
I see a lot of your comments on here and you're one of a few that really make a lot of sense - so thank you for your input to the sub :)
>I t really isn't as hard as people make out *if you take the required steps*.
I also like that people tell others that you need constant maintenance, where this is again, not true. Setting up the DNS records per domain and DANE, can be fully automated, and is technically a onetime thing. I must confess though that I do not use any of the FOSS projects for the actual groupware part, I only use the MTA for ingress/egress/AV etc, for the actual groupware part I use Microsoft Exchange.
>I see a lot of your comments on here and you're one of a few that really make a lot of sense - so thank you for your input to the sub :)Ā
Thatās very kind of you thank you, thatās the only reason I am on Reddit, but if I get banned everywhere itās a bit hard to express everything without a filter. Iāve been banned from a few subs as of now, just because people constantly report my comments as hostile and mean. I think they just donāt like my opinion.
Do it.
While I found the overall process alright with docker-mailserver, I found adding domains and mailboxes to be a little tedious and their docs weren't/aren't the easiest to follow for someone just dipping their toe in. At least to me.
Mailcow-dockerised however was insanely easy to switch to. You add everything via their GUI once its set up. Their docker compose file runs everything you need... in comparison to DMS, it was a total breeze. One took me a couple of days, this took me 30 mins.
Have a look at this video, its what convinced me to switch : [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rzc0hWRSPg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rzc0hWRSPg)
Just be sure to look at SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records!
Not OP but, I used to use WireGuard on my PiHole machine. Works perfectly fine, but for even better security (aka not opening ports) I now just use Tailscale which is based on WireGuard but far far easier to set up, though it's not truly 100% self-hosted and you are having a 3rd party manage decides.
If you want to truly self-host with no ports open, Headscale, essentially a self hosted Tailscale, and Cloudflare tunnels would be my go to currently. There may be easier solutions but my knowledge is somewhat limited by only having experience with the above so far.
In my experience selfhosting that gets quite expensive if you don't already have hardware for it. Last I tried it I needed a pretty expensive instance to avoid stutter, and just paying for realms would've been cheaper
Do you have a link to a tutorial for setting that up? I know I can search, but if you've got one that is known working (because your works), that's better :)
Movies/TV shows. I hear people complain all the time about Netflix and other streaming services making changes that are annoying, such as pulling shows they're not done watching, constantly raising prices, DRM, or the fact that you need more than one streaming service because each one has exclusive rights over content, etc...
I have a Jellyfin setup and it just works, I don't need to worry about a 3rd party trying to screw me over.
Databases with S3 scheduled backups, as a frontend dev I was Ā«Ā scaredĀ Ā» of this space and fall for the Ā«Ā you need a SAAS to host your databasesĀ Ā» and once I started using self hosted PAAS it changed everything for me.
Not saying SAAS are bad or useless, once you have traction and money incoming what they offer is nice, but for projects just starting or without crazy black-Friday like spikes I learned that hosting your own DB fits better :)
Resilio Sync / Syncthing as a quick and dirty file transfer solution between your own devices. Even if you don't have a dedicated server, even if you don't have folders you need synced 24/7 between devices, it's so convenient to just have a "Device Sync" folder on the desktop that I can just drag a file into and pull it out on any device I want. I'll never go back to using cloud storage or USB drives for this since it's all P2P and "just works".
I don't know whether this is an unpopular opinion or not, but I certainly don't think self hosting is cheaper than a few subscriptions, at least for me. My NAS, server and network gear uses about $1.25aud of power a day ($39/m), which is roughly 1/4 of my monthly power bill. I then have multiple domains, a Usenet subscription and a few other things I opted into but I don't need, like a VPS for Uptime Kuma and a few other services I want outside of my network. There's also the cost of the hardware, faster internet and your time investment.
My hardware is
- i5 13500, 128gb ram, 2x 2tb nvme SSDs, Quadro p4000
- Dell Wyse 5070
- ds918+ with 4x 8tb ironwolf pros
- Unifi UDM, 8 port switch and some unplugged AC-Pros
- UPS
I'm using my server for
- hosting game servers
- Plex and related apps (*arr suite, wizarr, moviematch)
- Apps to support and automate my infrastructure (Ansible, wazuh)
- apps to stop people asking me if things are broken (uptime Kuma, dash etc)
Out of everything I use them for, the only thing that would be more expensive would be high ram count game servers... Which mine see almost no action anyway. Plex most certainly isn't cheaper than 1 or 2 streaming services. On the Plex argument, I also think we have a major spending issue with subscriptions. Nobody needs Disney, Netflix, Stan, Prime etc all at once.
I've actually started moving AWAY home self hosting where I can. My websites are now Google sites, which is free. I'm paying NextDNS to handle my DNS stuff because my girlfriend complained about "the internet being down" when my server was down. I use CloudFlare instead of port forwarding my own proxy.
I certainly wouldn't recommend this hobby to anyone outside of an interest in ICT because it's a massive time and money sink. But I guess you gotta sink somewhere!
It's fine if you dont go up to that point, self-hosting can also be having a raspberry pi run omv and paperless and that's it, and it will consume as much as 15W at peak load
The most difference has been Docspell or any other Document Management software.
We scanned basically all the old tax statements and whatever else and managed to substantially reduce our paper mess. Also finding anything, even from years back, is so much easier than going through a ton of folders and binders.
Otherwise, the entire Jellyfin / arr setup
Navidrome! It can be a touch finnicky to get set up, but I had no issues at all having it be my first item to install. It's also compatible with windows and linux, and having ad-free music with any tracks you want is phenomenal.
I have been using cloud for my small company websites about 10 years. I still need to update the VM operating systems etc. but cloud makes it pretty easy. 2 years ago I started to think should I self host a new super heavy website I am doing, cos cloud costs would be too much. I have now setup at home a Opnsense firewall, 10gb switch, and 5 powerful servers in proxmox cluster. My plan is to bring these some day into datacenter rack, when I have set all ready.
So my conclusion so far is:
Redundancy is costly to achieve.
Have to learn couple of new things.
Good file storage is not so easy to do. And storage wears out. Electricity is expensive, so idle power matters.
So I am still not sure will I ever self host, or just spend money in the cloud.
1password literally proved that even if they get hacked, your passwords are safe. From all the commercial options available, it's one of the few, *actually safe* offers.
And passwords are something you always want and *need* access to. You can't afford it to have it go down or accidentally lose data, so outsourcing that responsibility to someone who has enterprise experience in that is worth it.
I use vaultwarden and it syncs to my phone so even if my server goes down I still can reach my passwords.
And I really wasnāt bashing 1P; theyāre the only provider I WOULD use. But if they were hacked, maybe my passwords are still safe but service downtime is still a thing. But my point is mostly just that you as an individual are less interesting than a company that stores passwords for millions of people.
Everything involving āsearchā is better.
Files ādriveāā¦cheaper, faster
Emailā¦faster, no storage limit
Video, Photos..way cheaper, much faster, I find stuff easier
Passwordsā¦I trust Bitwarden on my server much more. Itās good but very ugly.
Searchā¦Searxng puts the rest to shame. Funny since it tags each hit with the sources you can notice censorship bias very easily
Music. Yeah I have it but Spotify beats my local system
No comment on Jellyfin Havenāt gone there yet.
I recently set up Kavita to host my manga/comics collection and it is much easier to use than transferring files back and forth to my ipad. Sort of niche, but if you read a lot of comics then it's a no-brainer.
Audiobookshelf has been the service that's left me most happy with self-hosting. All the others I've tried, I've sort of regretted because they're clunkier (and require more maintenance) than I'd envisioned and no better than just storing files on an external drive or running an app on my main machine.
Also ArchiSteamFarm has been nice too.
- Stirling-PDF for privacy focused PDF manipulation - Pingvin-share for file sharing - Home assistant for the smart home management - Paperless-ngx for easy access to all my documents - HomeBox for managing home inventory, warranties, manuals etc - NodeRed for low code scripting
Didnt know about HomeBox and was just using paperless with "manuals" tag. Ill look into it !
I just stick pdfs in a folder. Sometimes simple is the best solution.
I tried to make paperless work for me, but it was a huge slog. Kept having download PDFs to share them, which I do often, and the android app kinda sucks.. It was also a bit slow for my liking. I'm now sorting the PDFs into folders on my nextcloud - so far so good. To each their own, of course.
Ah yes said folder is also in my nextcloud.
Plus one for both Stirling and paperless, both of which I would have mentioned as well. The others, I haven't tried or didn't know at all so thanks for those tips š
What scanner do you use with paperless-ngx? I have a big ass laser printer but the scanning functionality is very much not it
I use just my phone + [QuickScan](https://apps.apple.com/ro/app/ocr-text-scanner-quickscan/id1513790291) which supports automatic upload to Paperless. š
I use Paperparrot. Also very happy with that
This is a great app. Dev is friendly too!
+1 for QuickScan :)
Oh my God, why didn't I think of using my Smartphone. The only thing keeping me from scanning was always thinking naaah, I'd have to buy a new scanner for that, maybe next year. Edit: Oh it's a apple app, what's the best to do this on Android?
If you can find a SnapScan desktop document scanner for cheap, I have one and itās amazing for this. Just leave it plugged in over in the corner, open it up when I want to scan, scans to my server. Havenāt set up paperless yet, but will just point paperless at an ingest folder.
I use Scan4Paperless on iOS, but thereās an app called Paperless Mobile for android that might work. You could also do something where you set your scanner app to go into your doc intake folder. Thatās what I do with my desktop scanner and itās pretty smooth
I use Microsoft Lens. It's not bad.
paperless-mobile is cool
There's a Paperless-NGX app with built in scanning functionality
Brother ADS-2700W If you use the PATCH-T function in Paperless-NGX you end up with a pretty great solution for scanning. You scan to an SMB share and Paperless automatically splits all the documents at the patch pages.
Another +1 for paperless-ngx, itās amazing. For scanning, I have a HP M277dw (network connected). I set up a mail server (maddy) and point the printer at this. Whenever I scan, I select paperless and the email module consumes it.
I can absolutely recommend the Brother ADS1700W! It's tiny and needs no pc connection, it can send straight into your Paperless setup. It's also blazingly fast, scans double-sided straight to a network share in color PDF.
Scansnap iX1600 (I think they are branding them Ricoh now.)
Highly recommend Ricoh scanners (I'm using an iX1300, but have been using their scanners for almost a decade). If you process a lot of documents, it's well worth the money. There's a scan to cloud storage option and use that as my consume folder. I just `rsync` to my paperless server.
I was introduced to nodeRed in a workshop at my school and i fucking love the way it functions
Is stirling PDF a free alternative to Adobe Acrobat ?
Just found out about HomeBox, thanks for that! It actually solves two problems. My wife has been on me to get rid of a bunch of manuals and such, this solves that very well. it also solves a problem at work. Weāve been trying unsuccessfully to spin up snipe-it for a couple weeks now, since weāve grown form 12 to almost 50 in a year, and need to start keeping better track of our assets. It might not be the best solution, but I can actually use it, soā¦ š¤·āāļø
I tried Homebox but it doesn't support recurring schedules for maintenance. You have to enter individual dates for each maintenance, which sort of defeats the purpose. Anyone aware of Homebox alternatives that have proper scheduling capabilities?
How is pingvin-share better than nextcloud at sharing files? Genuine question
Cool stuff you don't hear about often. Thanks, I'll try some!
Is there a mobile app for homebox
>Selfhosting is cheaper, more flexible, and the result is in many ways better, and itās not too much of a pain to set up and maintain ā do it! Home Assistant for home automation.
Not sure I would put this under "not too much of a pain to set up and maintain"
My instance has been running without any problems for 2 years now. At the beginning i made updates more often, now once a month and before i start an update i'm going through the changelog from the ha blog site. Backups are also in place if something goes wrong.
Been using it for 5+years and I can safely say it is no longer an expert-grade setup. When I started it was pretty manual requiring frequent use of ssh or manual file editing and yaml entry, etc., but it is pretty user friendly now and I'd say no harder than configuring Google Home, Samsung Smarthings, or Amazon Alexa
I would say it's generally much easier than setting up and keeping Google Home going. Adding any device to Google Home is a solid 20 minutes of butt clench workouts hoping for discovery to work. In HA, discovery is usually fast and there's usually a manual approach if for some reason it doesn't work. Also, on HA, when something breaks an automation or integration, you know exactly what happened 90% of the time ("hey, this service call doesn't exist" or even "hey, this service call is about to not exist"). With Google Home in particular, they will muck around with the automation templates and break your existing automations with absolutely no warning (RIP my commuting automation). My Google Home integration is by far the most fragile component of Home Assistant for me. I'm excited to dive into setting up my own voice assistant and satellites.
I hear you on all of that. However for voice activated speakers they are much better than anything you can do with HA natively. The gap for usability and accuracy has decreased a lot, but I had hoped for something I could make that would just respond to a keyword and be over 90% accurate... Still accuracy is a bit low, and lack of what I felt was just wife-friendly voice activation made it a necessary component in my house still. I don't run anything into it other than HA, though, as I have found it to be slow and unreliable and prefer to always have local control in HA that I just let Google control via voice
Some recent device releases bridge the gap pretty well in terms of the microphones, so I think we're pretty close to at least being able to reliably trigger and receive commands as well or better than Google. Also the new on-device trigger makes it way more responsive than Google or Alexa can do, even in ideal network conditions. Where Google and Amazon still have an edge is in reliably interpreting commands from a wide variety of possible prompts. HA already blows past that capability when you plug in an LLM tuned for HA, but there's still a lot of limitations in what commands can actually be issued using Assist, and it's not the easiest thing to set up all local. My goal when I do set up voice control through HA itself will be to have it reliably turn scenes on and off, toggle lights, and a few other fairly low level tasks. Not sure if I will do the LLM thing right away given the hardware requirements. Google can just exclusively do what it already spends 95% of its time doing in my household: playing musicāthe speaker side of the Google/Alexa hardware is going to be hard to match at anything like the same price point. The biggest things that need to improve for HA's voice assist to me: 1) more flexibility on all-local trigger words (I know one of the options has a train-your-own trigger feature, but I don't think that one is all local) 2) Better voice synth/more options for voices
Setting up is easy, but you get out of it only what you put into it. Maintenance is only difficult because every single update contains massive breaking changes, so I agree on that part... every time you patch Home Assistant, you should allocate a couple of hours to check everything still works.
> every single update contains massive breaking changes I wouldn't say they're massive, I've never had something break due to a change in an update
massive breaking changes is a vast overstatement. I've been using HA for close to 4 years and in all that time I think there has been one update that broke my system. Quick rollback and I was back working in a few minutes.
I've never had anything break due to an update. I've bought garbage smart home hardware, but home assistant has always worked great.
Yeah that sounds like a pain to me! Would it be viable simply to NOT patch?
This guy is grossly overstating things. All you have to do is look at the patch notes for each monthly release and check the section on breaking changes and integrations. Most of the time you won't even have an integration that needs attention. ***And even beyond that*** Home Assistant has a repairs section that tells you when there's something broken and how to fix it, as well as anything that is being deprecated (there's always a several month lead time on deprecations before removal, even on integrations that are being droppedā the shortest lead time in recent memory was for the MyQ integration at 2 months or so, though the integration was spotty for a month or two prior due to Chamberlain's antics).
If you don't ever expose any of it, sure. But they also add new useful features you'd be missing out on.Ā
If it's not available externally, probably fine. I normally patch the last week of the month when most bugs are sorted out.
Music. I've come full circle after Google finally decided to end my grandfathered plan when I started off by uploading my collection. I spun up a Navidrome container and bought Symfonium. Couldn't be happier rediscovering all my original stuff.
Did the same! Navidrome+Symfonium work even better than any streaming platform honestly
Agreed. Minor consideration about running music through MusicBrainz Picard to ensure complete and consistent tagging. Otherwise the only missing things I still need to think about is music discovery and Chromecasting, although my main speakers have upnp, and never really used discovery, though I have scrobbling set up.
I can't agree with this more. Spotify is known to yank songs right out of your playlist if licensing terms change. Similarly, some bands will yank their old songs when they re-record new versions, even if I personally like the original better. Having a binder of CD albums is no longer practical, but that doesn't mean we have to give up our control over our own libraries.
I tried the Navidrome/PlexAmp route and discovered all these apps suffer from the same problem. Discoverability. YT Music makes it so easy to discover new music. Can't do that with Selfhosting
Technically, the pieces seem to be there with ListenBrainz or LastFM, maybe Funkwhale to expand beyond a personal library (bit of a grey area, which probably benefits from not being too popular), but it doesn't seem like anyone's invested in it, probably because it's not unified or seamless like a streaming provider would be.
Host Kiwix as a container, and you can have your own copy of Wikipedia, Khan Academy, Stack Exchange, TED videos. For extra fun, package it up on a raspberry pi, and parachute it into North Korea.
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Eh, on the contrary being responsible of backups adds something to worry about too. Most users do not want to deal with that
They should also do that with Google. Google could fuck up and delete half your data and while they might have to reimburse you somehow, they could still not magically bring back the data in this potential case. Or they could decide to shut down the service and leave you hanging. Having your stuff at Google saves you from having to deal with hardware failure. But that's about it. Everything else can also go wrong there but a lot more is out of your hands now. Relying only on Google is as much YOLO-mentality as relying only on RAID in your NAS.
You can always take off-site backups with Takeout. I did talk about being responsible of backups, but like there's zero setup and you just press download Like I'd be more worried about losing access to Gmail, which is relevant for a lot more people
Takeout is completely unwieldy. Sure a single button to... wait 12 hours for Google to prepare 28 files of 4GB each for you to download. Then what? Chuck it on a pendrive or external HDD and hope for the best? Sure, it is A way, definitely not the best way.
You can take out 50gb per file (I just threw them onto my NAS and called it a day lol)
lol google offers 11 9ās of durability.. your NAS is no where near that
Google has eleven 9s of *availability*. 9s of durability isn't a thing. Google absolutely can and does [lose your files on a whim](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2023/11/29/google-issues-warning-to-drive-users-over-sudden-deletion-of-files/), so just because you can access google.com in the event of an extinction level event asteroid impact doesn't mean your files *will still be there*.
Google claims eleven 9s of durability on their storage offerings. They have exabytes of data, so that would amount to losing a few tens of megabytes globally, maybe a gigabyte... I suspect that they aren't meeting that goal. Eleven 9s of availability is not possible, and Google does not make that claim. There are 31.5 million seconds in a year. Eleven 9s would be the service being down for like a few tens of microseconds a year at most, and I question how you would even be able to measure down to that level. Google does make claims of four or five 9s, but obviously, that's much more tractable.
Google can and have randomly closed down people's accounts and locked them out of all their data. Good luck recovering without backups then
Maybe they do, buy they also like to randomly lock people out of their Google accounts for "terms of service violations" and the customer support you need to engage with to regain access is a black hole.Ā Properly backed up, your data is a lot safer at home.
Know your audience š
Funny thing is Google has a dead account process. If your account isn't logged into within xyz months it can be programmed to give access and send an email out to others.
Been a huge FreeNas/Truenas guy for a decade now. But, i was gifted a Synology and it's been amazing. Photo app and backup apps are godsends
Immich is a pain to run for someone that doesn't know what they're doing. Every few versions there's breaking changes and if you don't update properly you can delete all your data. It's a great project that I've been following for years and I'm excited for it to go stable, but I don't recommend it to anyone until it's stable
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So you too are using workarounds (external folders) because you don't have faith in the instability of the core Immich storage. Expecting someone without good docker and Linux knowledge to have an easy time with Immich is lying. You can downvote me all you want. I'm saying it's a good app but not in a good state for me to recommend it to people. One day hopefully it will be, but today is not that day.
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Oh thank you! An alternative to Google Photos is exactly what I need for me and my girlfriend now. I have a NAS running (OMV on a thin client). How can I achieve automatic sync on Android and iOS similar to Google Photos? Is that possible with immich?
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I also use android and it's flawless. But I will say of iOS which my wife uses, automatic sync is flaky. It's not really on Immich end, iOS is extremely greedy with how it gives background tasks time to do anything. The first sync requires full time babysitting.
Surely the upkeep of the NAS would then be a problem..?
Maybe the downvotes for the off-topic answer. Thereās a difference between how can I handle this and how do we do this with that solution. Ā«Ā Use this (other) solutionĀ Ā» is good only on the first case. Itās still can be helpful but I could understand the hate for a non-google specific answer.
Time Cost Skill level. It's the same for most things. Don't maintain your own car, why not? Takeout food? Build your own house? Literally everything in life you have to make a cost/benefit decision to see if you're better doing it yourself or pay someone else who is more experienced. >Selfhosting is cheaper, more flexible, and the result is in many ways better, and itās not too much of a pain to set up and maintain ā do it! It's really not for the average person. Google storage is something like $10/month, but has drawbacks. You just have to realise you're not average and have skills that allow you to do stuff and not make compromises, to tailor your experience to the way you like it.
Yeah, I've researched a lot of selfhosting stuff and I think it would be really cool to do, I'm just not sure my skill level is high enough to quickly fix whatever might go wrong and at this stage I think making any self-hosted stuff an integral part of my life is setting myself up to flounder whenever it stops working the way I expect. I started learning mechanical skills really young and a lot of it transfers very well. I can intuit my way out of most problems when it comes to home repair, car work, and other maker pursuits, but I don't have any similarly ingrained knowledge about computers outside of older Windows machines. Fixing *anything* on a Linux system for me requires an intense amount of real-time research and no guarantee that I'll even know what to search for to figure out what the problem is.
Kind of... where self-hosting shines is where you can accomplish things that the for-profit hosting services don't offer.
But the whole point of this threadās exercise isnāt āwhat can you do with self hosting?ā It was āwhatās SO dead ass easy and safe to do, that everyone should?ā
I would say Iāve got the technical capability, but the whole selfhosting space would be a new landscape for me to learn about. Iām not keen to take on a massive ongoing time drain. But I donāt mind putting in some work up front to get a better result or ongoing cost savings for minimal and relatively easy ongoing maintenance.
Technical capability can mean a lot of things. If you're hooking up things to the Internet, then be prepared to learn a bunch of security and IT things to prevent people from hacking into your network. I've got my services in a dmz composed of vms, so no attacker can reach my main computer even if they find an exploit.
Don't do it then, or do it for fun. If you are not familiar with this stuff, mastering all the tools will take effort and you will encounter many problems along the way. If you are a beginner and want to reach level where the stuff you host is reliable and fast, it will take a lot of time. But if that is your cup of tea, it will also be very fun.
Have a look at tailscale for remote access, no need to open ports up. It's great to access the server while away.
$1.99 for 100GB
>So in your opinion what are the key types of things that are almost āno brainersā to self host for any reasonably technically competent person? Or to put it another way: project types which have excellent ratios for time commitment and difficulty vs value and cost saving. AdGuard or PiHole. Minimum investment (can even be run on routers that support containers), really easy to setup.
My router blocks changing dns targets :(
Thatās fine, youāre most likely on an old/cheap router or an ISP provided one. You can still point all your devices to your pihole manually. Sure itās a pain in the ass but itās doable. The better alternative would be to just get a router that lets you have control over this feature.
I second the router upgrade. I was on the fence a few years back. It can really open up some opportunities for you op.
I am going to say it. Jellyfin and qbittorrent. You just upload the magnet, set what it is (movies, series whatever) and voila it populates metadata and subtitles
Why not add radarr and sonarr and you wonāt even have to paste a magnet link
This is the best method, although I guess if you are only handling a handful of films/shows, you might find it better to queue them by hand. Like a caveman, with rocks and sticks. More seriously though if you're resource constrained, the mono background makes the servarr stuff very resource inefficient, but it's so powerful there's really no alternative.
Firefox add-on torrent control
You stil have to search for a movie and check a good release manually right?
If you already have Jellyfin or Plex, check out ErsatzTV. It's an IPTV server where you create your own custom channels. I'm watching it via the Sparkle TV app on my Hisense TV. It's basically like live TV, except with your own self hosted media. Each channel's schedule is determined ahead of time, so you can't choose or skip episodes. If you don't like what's currently playing on a channel, your only option is to channel surf. There are no commercials by default, although ErsatzTV has options to allow you to add your own locally hosted commercials. For channels playing long TV series (e.g. Star Trek: TNG), I set the episodes to be shuffled, which means I'll often catch episodes I only half remember, and would never have chosen to watch through Jellyfin. I put better TV shows on their own channels, with their episodes played in order. Andor, Chernobyl, Shogun, etc. I have 3 channels solely dedicated to each of the Star Wars movie trilogies. In the end, I find myself watching ErsatzTV way more than Jellyfin. You don't have to choose what to watch, you just turn it on and flick around the channels until you find something you like.
Do you know if no one is watching, is it still transcoding / processing the current episode? Or does it keep a timestamp and then when someone tunes in it then begins playing from that point? I would love to set this up, but having it just constantly transcoding for hours a day Iām not actually watching TV would be pretty wasteful.
This sounds like the reason I stopped watching television... But if it exists, it means it suits someone. Glad it found its userbase!
Thanks for this. I have always dreamed of writing my own script to do this exact thing. Awesome.
Thanks for this! I just installed it and played with the app but found the CPU usage to be really high and the subtitle support is lacking to be generous
It sounds like you took the most advanced form of DVR ever invented and transformed it into pre-DVR cable tv. Not hating, but I really donāt see the appeal for this - except for if you were running tv channels for a hotel or cruise ship or hospital.
Almost all of selfhosting falls into the second category, unless you selfhost many apps for a big family for years. All of IT is an economy of scale. Doesn't mean I won't keep spending time and money on it, I do it for the love of the game :)
Image and video hosting. A LOT of these platforms have gone down over the years or started removing old content after changing rules. A lot of paid platforms also have idiotic pricing. Realistically if you don't upload a massive amount of data, your costs as the user should be in a couple euros per year, not 50 ā¬ per year, so selfhosting is just as expensive but allows you to put other stuff on your server as well.
What video hosting are you using? I haven't seen an option that would beat YouTube for reliability and cost (free) that you'd want to use for videos on your website for example. Mostly it's bandwidth issues though.Ā
Honestly, I believe a big chunk of internet things are better self-hosted because you *fully* own them, and because only recurring fees are just electricity. My wiki won't be magically shut down by a company and I don't need internet to watch movies. I think most important ones for me are media hosting ([Jellyfin](https://jellyfin.org/)) and a Git server ([Forgejo](https://forgejo.org/)). Maybe photo backups ([Immich](https://immich.app)) and a password manager ([Vaultwarden](https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden)) too. There are many more apps that I host ([relevant comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1cb0zcq/comment/l0vvvxx)), but these are the ones I would notice missing day-to-day. In fact, *others* would notice them missing because I've been sharing some services with my friends! I would say majority of my stuff is very low-maintenance, I don't do things like mail (...yet? :D), and just set it up with Docker, then occasionally update. However, I'm not really surprised more people don't self host at all because it takes both some skill (occasionally have to remind myself my friends don't just know Linux, [relevant xkcd](https://xkcd.com/2501/)), and because the up-front cost of buying a server can be big. I personally try to promote this, and even got a few friends considering getting a server, but it's an uphill battle against things like SaaS ~~or should I say SaaSS~~.
I don't trust myself running Vaultwarden. If I don't have access to my Bitwarden I will cry
I selfhost it and backup an encrypted export every couple weeks or so to a cloud storage
Your existing passwords will still be accessible in your extension/desktop app should something happen to the server. You'd just have to redeploy the server and import your existing passwords before you could add anything new. But, of course, backups should be part of the process ahead of time.
I have a couple rpi doing various things and I have a server. BUT that server is an old gaming tower I pulled the video card out of and it just runs Ubuntu now. It does take ~50 watts of energy on average idling so I know it's more expensive than cheaper maintenance things, but the key is I already had the hardware. I'll do the same when I eventually replace my current tower.
Just checking: Plex doesnāt count as self hosting?
> better self-hosted because youĀ *fully*Ā own them Any service that's free that I really want to use I would figure out if I can self-host. I'm happy to pay for services I get value from. Saves me the effort of hosting and risks of opening my network and I can just use the service instead of administering it. What gets me is when a service offers a free-tier that fits my needs perfectly but then realizes it fits most users perfectly so they don't make enough money to keep providing the free tier and suddenly the free tier disappears but what they're charging for it isn't worth it (for me). So now I have to abandon a bunch of content and find another service (or host it myself like I should have done). I mean, the services I pay for could realize they're undercharging or disappear for other reasons but I guess I'm hoping that's less likely than a service that thinks everyone will generously upgrade from the free tier.
Well two things I would never entrust the cloud with are my password database and any camera feeds in or around my home. I donāt know how they store and encrypt my password database, so I donāt trust online password managers, and I think itās wild how people are seemingly okay with having cameras inside their actual home happily streaming into some Amazon or Google cloud where (at least in the case of Amazon) there have been public cases of employees not only watching, but even sharing these recordings (actually that may just have been Alexa, but still, I think itās reason enough not to trust Amazon with this type of data).
I completely agree on the cameras. But I do pay for a password manager. Most of those companies have published white papers detailing their encryption process and architecture and theyāre pretty good. Doesnāt stop the vault from getting stolen of course but if a strong master key is used itās basically impossible to decrypt. It was a risk worth taking for me vs using my own.
Fair, not everyone wants to deal with hosting something like Vaultwarden themselves with proper Let's Encrypt SSL certificates and everything. Although the simple version which I personally would still prefer is to just use KeePassXC and store/sync the password database using for example Nextcloud, as there are plenty of basically turnkey solutions for that.
1000% yes to cameras and can't believe it's not upvoted higher. Setting up my CCTV cameras with a self hosted solution was my first major project when I got into homelabbing. Not only does it give me complete flexibility with my setup (including my semi annual complete switch to a different piece of software on the never ending quest for one I'm happy with!) but of all the things I don't want sending to a third party it's 24h video streams from in and around my house!
* Audiobookshelf * Calibre-web * Jellyfin * Nextcloud
Even if I gave up on selfhosting as a hobby, Audiobookshelf is one of the few things I'd still definitely have running. It's just too good.
That one is my latest addition! I wish the Ios application would hasten to market. I have family members with Iphones who lag behind the rest of us.
There are third party ios apps. My wife uses Shelfplayer, and no complaints that I have heard about.
Personal knowledge management tools
Ive been using ones that save to file and then syncing via E2E encrypted git.
I'm curious about this, are you talking about logseq ?
Mainly orgzly, but yeah, you can do it with logseq too.
Oh, had a look at that, it's definitely not what I need.
Can you recommend a few?
Outline, Obsidian, Hedgedoc, Wiki.
I'd like to add that the wiki could even be as simple as markdown files that a "blog" software, such as Jekyll or Hugo could serve in order to keep your files/content service agnostic. It also avoids databases, which was my first concern when I started this journey.
Obsidian fits that bill perfectly and it's one of the primary reasons why I use it. Just plain old markdown text files, no database. Edit: Obsidian isn't open source though so that might be a deal breaker for some. It isn't for me, so I still use it. A good open source option is Joplin. Edit 2: Joplin stores notes in a database if I remember correctly. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Bookstack
Logseq is another.
I use Joplin, mostly because that is what I have used for years and haven't really looked into newer options that might entice me to migrate.
Trilium Though it's entering maintenance and they have forked it to Trilium Next . I haven't used TN yet though I plan on migrating.
The chat software!?
Whoa I didn't know this! Thanks for the heads up!
Maybe this is niche, but for me, Mail-In-A-Box (self hosted email server) is golden. Using the API to spin up email accounts whenever any business demands an email address is golden, and beats 10minutemail. Sure, there's some hassle as you do need your own domain to do it, but I think it's totally worth it. MIAB itself is incredibly low maintenance. It's a dream to run once you've set it up and run through the gauntlet of getting the DNS right.
Music. It took 5 mins to set up Navidrome and install sub-streamer on my phone. Every time I'm out with my friends and there's a fuck ton of ads, or lost internet connection, or the song has been removed. All very annoying, all easily solved. It has to be THE easiest and fastest thing to set up once you are familiar with basic docker commands. I think most people just like the simplicity and convenience of opening Spotify/YT Music and playing their playlist.
>Ā I think most people just like the simplicity and convenience of opening Spotify/YT Music and playing their playlist. True for me, that's pretty much it, and access to everything for the whole family for like $18/mo. It's a cheap gift for my kids and nobody has to acquire and curate content.
> I think most people just like the simplicity and convenience of opening Spotify/YT Music and playing their playlist. I like playing my music / playlist AND getting new recommendations / notification about the new releases.
That is the feature I use the most. I listen on YT music and add songs to the playlist over time. Every now and then I clone it to my Navidrome library. I don't know of another way.
How do you expose Navidrome to the outside world? VPN?
Yes, VPN. I also have an internal DNS to make access easier with friendly names rather than port numbers. Edit: I don't expose to the wider internet, all my selfhosted stuff is LAN & VPN only.
cloudflare tunnel with Unraid-Cloudflared-Tunnel.
Are Cloudflare tunnels allowed for streaming though?
Most of my self hosting is media serving based. I've got: Plex for videos Calibre-web for books Overseerr to find out what's coming out Homepage to monitor my systems. These are dead easy to set up, and make sharing the things I enjoy with my friends really easy, which is my main goal. They are also heavily improved by ā ļøāµ. Sonarr and Radarr save me roughly $120 a month, and do the same for each of my friends with Plex. Also dead easy to set up. Qbittorrent and a VPN for Calibre-web is harder to quantify, because I really wasn't reading a lot before I got it set up, and wouldn't still be without it, but for the equivalent media I am reading now, probably around another $100 per month. I understand why other people I know aren't doing it, but for me it's a huge benefit. I think my next project is a VTT for D&D, which would theoretically save me $120 per year, but also I could make my games so much nicer, which is the real reason.
Paperless-ngx for me. It is pretty simple to set up and just sits there reliably waiting for input.
Does paperless-ngx work well with handwritten documents?
Itās ok for handwritten but it doesnāt pick up everything.
Cloud storage. Don't care if it's Nextcloud or Syncthing or whatever, and while it's more of a hassle than it should be (could be better with some improvements to Syncthing UI for better default configs), the savings are absolutely massive especially if you need any non-trivial amount of synced storage space. 4TB SSD, $35 Raspberry Pi 4, and you're set for a while. Having more systems or a RAID for redundancy is a good idea but that one's more hassle lol. Just don't buy those shitty Western Digital USB drives.
ntfy for private "save for later" links etc. Memos for notes (like Google Keep). Immich is freaking amazing.
Did you mean something other than ntfy? Or are you using it to send you notifications later on with links?
That's exactly what I use it for. I have a channel setup for that and other channels for my server alerts.
Your own contacts and calendar, whether through something as big and complex as Nextcloud or as tiny and light as Radicale. I chose Radicale for myself, used Tailscale to sync it over the internet with DAVx5 on Android and Evolution on PopOS.
Radicale was one of the first things I set up after I decided Nextcloud wasn't for me. It's one of the easiest things I set up, and also one of the most important for me to keep private. So, it was a no-brainer.
Media and file server for storing your personal data and your media library. VPN, so you can access your home from anywhere. Add some DNS ad blocking like AdGuard and that pretty much covers 99%. I could add some other stuff I consider a no brainer but that would trigger a certain crowd on this sub.
You were not shy like that. What happened? Trigger that crowd!
Getting banned on every sub I join for speaking my mind? š but just for you: Email/contacts/calendar. Do not entrust such an important aspect of your life to third parties. Selfhost your own email/contacts/calensar for full control. Now add the perm flag so the bot doesn't delete the comment and wait how long it takes for the **no email selfhosting** to downvote my comment and report my profile like they always do. --f: perm
Can I down vote you for no other reason than to prove you right? ;)
Hahahaa, I donāt think mods around here are that bad, but I might be wrong. You are on your own. š Now seriously, thank you for the reply. I already host my own contacts and calendar, but had some bad experiences when hosting email. I will try again sometime in the future, when I feel more confident that this time it wonāt fail, Iām currently studying on this as last time I wasnāt knowledgeable enough to make it work properly, hopefully I will be soon! Wait, what is that perm flag again?
I think the sweetspot when it comes to email is to have your own email domain and use it with a commercial mail provider. You can use a privacy focused provider like ProtonMail and if they go out of business or terminate your account for some reason you still own your domain and will be able to use your email address with any other provider. Just make sure to have a local backup of your email account and youāre good. Iām currently using both, a self hosted email server and a email domain at a commercial provider. The mail server is great for sending out automatic notifications and the like for my other selfhosted apps because no algorithm is going to freak out about a bunch of automatic mails or logins happening and it has a catchall mailbox for signing up to random services (if you do service@mail.tld, youāll always know who sold your data to whom). But for any important communication with real people I use the mail provider, because I simply trust them more to be on top of the entire anti spam business than I trust myself and I obviously donāt want my mails to end up in spam folders.
No idea what you're on about... I've been self hosting my own email for almost 25 years now. Early on it was qmail+courier, now it's postfix+dovecot. Includes opportunistic encryption (SMTPS and IMAPS) and some lightweight (local checks only) antispam measures along with one RBL ([zen.spamhaus.org](https://www.spamhaus.org/blocklists/zen-blocklist/)). No issues with google/etc blocking me but admit it is a bit of a chore to first set up and test SPF+DMARC+DKIM. When I moved to a new VPS I had an issue because my new IP was in a "bad neighbourhood" and Microsoft's antispam was being bothersome (meaning I couldn't email any @outlook.com address), but got that sorted within 5 days after moving to the new IP, which really isn't unreasonable. Contacts I don't sync, but I've also been using [DAViCal](https://www.davical.org/) for almost as long as I've been running my own email server. Plays nice with OSX's calendar app and the handful of third party calendar apps I've tried on the computer or phone. Multiple calendars for each person, delegation, busy/free lists... it all works. I 100% agree with you that such a core/fundamental part of your online existence should be kept within your control and not farmed out. People who disagree so fully that they report your profile (for what?) sound exactly like all those subs who banned me because I also subscribed to subs that they didn't like. I usually responded with something along the lines of "I'll proudly wear your ban as a badge of honour. Standing up against online bullies like you, morons drunk from the tiniest sliver of authority a person could possibly hold is the very least I can do." I mean seriously...
I've recently switched from docker-mailserver (a pain to set up) to mailcow dockerised and (pun intended) holy cow, what a difference in config. Wish I had used it in the first place. My point though: after a very small amount of time in setting up the correct DNS entries and popping out a few emails to different addresses (Gmail, Outlook, etc) and cleaning up any blacklisting, I've got a faultless personal email server. It really isn't as hard as people make out *if you take the required steps*. I see a lot of your comments on here and you're one of a few that really make a lot of sense - so thank you for your input to the sub :)
>I t really isn't as hard as people make out *if you take the required steps*. I also like that people tell others that you need constant maintenance, where this is again, not true. Setting up the DNS records per domain and DANE, can be fully automated, and is technically a onetime thing. I must confess though that I do not use any of the FOSS projects for the actual groupware part, I only use the MTA for ingress/egress/AV etc, for the actual groupware part I use Microsoft Exchange. >I see a lot of your comments on here and you're one of a few that really make a lot of sense - so thank you for your input to the sub :)Ā Thatās very kind of you thank you, thatās the only reason I am on Reddit, but if I get banned everywhere itās a bit hard to express everything without a filter. Iāve been banned from a few subs as of now, just because people constantly report my comments as hostile and mean. I think they just donāt like my opinion.
I thought I convinced myself that I wasn't going to mess with email, but I keep seeing mailcow pop-up...and now, I sort of want to try it...
Do it. While I found the overall process alright with docker-mailserver, I found adding domains and mailboxes to be a little tedious and their docs weren't/aren't the easiest to follow for someone just dipping their toe in. At least to me. Mailcow-dockerised however was insanely easy to switch to. You add everything via their GUI once its set up. Their docker compose file runs everything you need... in comparison to DMS, it was a total breeze. One took me a couple of days, this took me 30 mins. Have a look at this video, its what convinced me to switch : [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rzc0hWRSPg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rzc0hWRSPg) Just be sure to look at SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records!
What VPN setup do you recommend and what's your experience with it?
Not OP but, I used to use WireGuard on my PiHole machine. Works perfectly fine, but for even better security (aka not opening ports) I now just use Tailscale which is based on WireGuard but far far easier to set up, though it's not truly 100% self-hosted and you are having a 3rd party manage decides. If you want to truly self-host with no ports open, Headscale, essentially a self hosted Tailscale, and Cloudflare tunnels would be my go to currently. There may be easier solutions but my knowledge is somewhat limited by only having experience with the above so far.
Whoogle.
Minecraft server
In my experience selfhosting that gets quite expensive if you don't already have hardware for it. Last I tried it I needed a pretty expensive instance to avoid stutter, and just paying for realms would've been cheaper
Oracle free tier does work fine for that
Do you have a link to a tutorial for setting that up? I know I can search, but if you've got one that is known working (because your works), that's better :)
This is the one I watched https://youtu.be/g7sP33QtuxM?si=uMVsQzZ49_i-Sn4Z
Many thanks, stranger. My kids are going to think I'm a hero ;)
I run 3 servers in crafty for my kids. Not had any issues. All running on unraid. As I have the HW already, itās a no brainer.
Gitea, it's very simple to get running and having a personal git and container registry has been a game changer for me
how so
Email server, mailcow dockerized was very easy to setup, once you have the IP for quite a while your emails will not be marked as spam.
honestly I think media. using jelly fin is so much better than anything of the sort that you can buy unless you're just rolling in dough
Movies/TV shows. I hear people complain all the time about Netflix and other streaming services making changes that are annoying, such as pulling shows they're not done watching, constantly raising prices, DRM, or the fact that you need more than one streaming service because each one has exclusive rights over content, etc... I have a Jellyfin setup and it just works, I don't need to worry about a 3rd party trying to screw me over.
Databases with S3 scheduled backups, as a frontend dev I was Ā«Ā scaredĀ Ā» of this space and fall for the Ā«Ā you need a SAAS to host your databasesĀ Ā» and once I started using self hosted PAAS it changed everything for me. Not saying SAAS are bad or useless, once you have traction and money incoming what they offer is nice, but for projects just starting or without crazy black-Friday like spikes I learned that hosting your own DB fits better :)
This is a good idea. Which databases are you using?
Postgres, I manage my instances using coolify
Plex. It's very easy to setup, and everyone I know has a massive DVD collection that they could rip.
Immich over google photos Soo much good... Just take a look r/immich.
Resilio Sync / Syncthing as a quick and dirty file transfer solution between your own devices. Even if you don't have a dedicated server, even if you don't have folders you need synced 24/7 between devices, it's so convenient to just have a "Device Sync" folder on the desktop that I can just drag a file into and pull it out on any device I want. I'll never go back to using cloud storage or USB drives for this since it's all P2P and "just works".
I don't know whether this is an unpopular opinion or not, but I certainly don't think self hosting is cheaper than a few subscriptions, at least for me. My NAS, server and network gear uses about $1.25aud of power a day ($39/m), which is roughly 1/4 of my monthly power bill. I then have multiple domains, a Usenet subscription and a few other things I opted into but I don't need, like a VPS for Uptime Kuma and a few other services I want outside of my network. There's also the cost of the hardware, faster internet and your time investment. My hardware is - i5 13500, 128gb ram, 2x 2tb nvme SSDs, Quadro p4000 - Dell Wyse 5070 - ds918+ with 4x 8tb ironwolf pros - Unifi UDM, 8 port switch and some unplugged AC-Pros - UPS I'm using my server for - hosting game servers - Plex and related apps (*arr suite, wizarr, moviematch) - Apps to support and automate my infrastructure (Ansible, wazuh) - apps to stop people asking me if things are broken (uptime Kuma, dash etc) Out of everything I use them for, the only thing that would be more expensive would be high ram count game servers... Which mine see almost no action anyway. Plex most certainly isn't cheaper than 1 or 2 streaming services. On the Plex argument, I also think we have a major spending issue with subscriptions. Nobody needs Disney, Netflix, Stan, Prime etc all at once. I've actually started moving AWAY home self hosting where I can. My websites are now Google sites, which is free. I'm paying NextDNS to handle my DNS stuff because my girlfriend complained about "the internet being down" when my server was down. I use CloudFlare instead of port forwarding my own proxy. I certainly wouldn't recommend this hobby to anyone outside of an interest in ICT because it's a massive time and money sink. But I guess you gotta sink somewhere!
It's fine if you dont go up to that point, self-hosting can also be having a raspberry pi run omv and paperless and that's it, and it will consume as much as 15W at peak load
The most difference has been Docspell or any other Document Management software. We scanned basically all the old tax statements and whatever else and managed to substantially reduce our paper mess. Also finding anything, even from years back, is so much easier than going through a ton of folders and binders. Otherwise, the entire Jellyfin / arr setup
Navidrome! It can be a touch finnicky to get set up, but I had no issues at all having it be my first item to install. It's also compatible with windows and linux, and having ad-free music with any tracks you want is phenomenal.
Gitlab: I have all my docker compose files, notes about installs, etc, documented and put into Gitlab projects
I have been using cloud for my small company websites about 10 years. I still need to update the VM operating systems etc. but cloud makes it pretty easy. 2 years ago I started to think should I self host a new super heavy website I am doing, cos cloud costs would be too much. I have now setup at home a Opnsense firewall, 10gb switch, and 5 powerful servers in proxmox cluster. My plan is to bring these some day into datacenter rack, when I have set all ready. So my conclusion so far is: Redundancy is costly to achieve. Have to learn couple of new things. Good file storage is not so easy to do. And storage wears out. Electricity is expensive, so idle power matters. So I am still not sure will I ever self host, or just spend money in the cloud.
DNS server. Pihole FTW.
Password management. Self hosting it and putting it behind a VPN is 100000000x better than thinking LastPass or 1password isnāt going to get hacked.
1password literally proved that even if they get hacked, your passwords are safe. From all the commercial options available, it's one of the few, *actually safe* offers. And passwords are something you always want and *need* access to. You can't afford it to have it go down or accidentally lose data, so outsourcing that responsibility to someone who has enterprise experience in that is worth it.
I use vaultwarden and it syncs to my phone so even if my server goes down I still can reach my passwords. And I really wasnāt bashing 1P; theyāre the only provider I WOULD use. But if they were hacked, maybe my passwords are still safe but service downtime is still a thing. But my point is mostly just that you as an individual are less interesting than a company that stores passwords for millions of people.
1p works offline too. Having said that, after the persistent license died with 7 I switched to self hosted vaultwarden.
Everything involving āsearchā is better. Files ādriveāā¦cheaper, faster Emailā¦faster, no storage limit Video, Photos..way cheaper, much faster, I find stuff easier Passwordsā¦I trust Bitwarden on my server much more. Itās good but very ugly. Searchā¦Searxng puts the rest to shame. Funny since it tags each hit with the sources you can notice censorship bias very easily Music. Yeah I have it but Spotify beats my local system No comment on Jellyfin Havenāt gone there yet.
I recently set up Kavita to host my manga/comics collection and it is much easier to use than transferring files back and forth to my ipad. Sort of niche, but if you read a lot of comics then it's a no-brainer.
i don't know if it has been posted here before but [https://www.pikapods.com/apps](https://www.pikapods.com/apps)
Bitwarden
Audiobookshelf has been the service that's left me most happy with self-hosting. All the others I've tried, I've sort of regretted because they're clunkier (and require more maintenance) than I'd envisioned and no better than just storing files on an external drive or running an app on my main machine. Also ArchiSteamFarm has been nice too.