UPDATE: To everyone who suggested YUNO, thank you so much. This is about to make my journey much easier. Thank you ALL for your suggestions, actually. It’s a bit overwhelming for an almost complete noobie but I an going to look into all of the suggestions in time. I just saw that there were several mentions of YUNO so I decided to make that one of the first things I investigated.
So, about two months ago, I had a very eye opening experience. As the result of a single misconfigured security setting on my Android, I was locked out of my Google Account on my phone AND all of my PCs. I had no access whatsoever to Google, or any of the literally hundreds of services that I get through Google.
This is when I realized that I relied entirely on Google/Android because those two days were actually very difficult, being cut off from media, services, passwords, everything, from the past almost twenty years of my life, could be taken away from me in an instant. The decades of my life that were locked away in my Google Account included hundreds of thousands of pictures, almost a hundred thousand audio tracks, several hundred books, several hundred apps, thousands of videos, etc. ad infinitum. Unfortunately, very little of this material was backed up at that point. That is my fault. Also, the misconfigured security setting was my fault as well.
The amount of data, media, memories, services, etc. that would have been lost is actually endless and it would have affected my life in several ridiculously negative ways.
Luckily, in the end, I was able to get my access back and then basically immediately grabbed all of the several terabytes of information and media of mine that they had, and that I was almost locked out of. I have it all in my house now on a drive in my computer, with a backup made on another disconnected disk.
I then decided that no corporation was ever going to have such an insanely high level of influence on and control over my entire life and my media ever again. That experience was actually very scary.
I’ve been trying to get into SelfHosting, but am finding it quite daunting and difficult.
There is a LOT of stuff that I have to learn, and I am mostly unsure of where to even begin. I know basically nothing about networking.
I need to learn the very basic stuff and work my way up from there, but everything that I’ve seen on the Internet assumes that the reader already has a basic to intermediate understanding of networking and the subjects that surround it. I do not, but I am going to learn.
I just need someone to show me where to start.
Thanks in advance for any assistance!
I can’t quite figure out the downvotes to my first reply for suggesting backups and docker… I think my mention of Windows did it (do please avoid Windows for what it’s worth).
If you have reliable, easy to access backups, then it takes away the doubt of self-hosting. Hence the suggestion for Backblaze as it’s so easy to implement. Put in an encryption key and your remote data is private. I use it for everything except Plex media, which is something I wouldn’t care if I lost.
As I said, I have a collection of old 2.5" drives hooked up to a USB hub on my office Macbook, which each dupe my important data from my server using Resilio (Syncthing is also an option). This way all my server data is duped locally twice (server and Macbook drives), plus also duped into the ‘cloud’ with Backblaze. And if I had to leave home in a rush and wanted my all data with me, I wouldn’t need to rip my server out, I can just grab the 2.5" drives and dash. (my total important storage is under 5TB)
I started with HyperV on Windows with VMs about 15 years ago, then moved to macOS about 5yrs ago with services running on desktop, then realised I needed a much better and more stable way of network segregation etc, so jumped to Unraid about 2 years ago and haven’t looked back. Docker on Unraid is as easy to use as it gets, and now my confidence with it has grown and my demands are getting slightly more complex, I’m moving to Dockge for Docker stacks, and Pangolin on a Hetzner VPS for remote access. Hetzner have a great firewall feature for your VPS, so you can lock it down to home access to get you started once you start on a VPS journey.
But I would recommend Unraid for sure on ANY old HP desktop PC from eBay. I got an Z1 i9-9900, 32Gb RAM for £250. Bonkers cheap for what it is. Throw some HDD in and SSDs for docker, and off you go. It idles at about 45W with 3 HDD and 4 SSD. Resilio syncs data to 2.5" HDD in my office, which then has Backblaze for cloud backups.
Good luck!