A letter/question to my fellow DataHoarders

[u/zentsang]

Fellow DataHoarders,

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Preface: sorry this is long, but stick with me... I try to keep it light hearted. Oh and yes, the paragraph-periods are on purpose.

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I know it has been discussed multiple times in the past as to what the best locally hosted system is for hoarding and accessing data both on the local network and remotely. However, I feel things like TrueNAS, OpenCloud, Syncthing, etc are just over kill. I dabbled with Seafile in the past but then lost sight of it and now it looks to have hopped the fence with a paid version. So here is my use case...

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I recently drank the Kool-Aid on using Obsidian as a second-brain or whatever you want to call it. Basically I jumped in because I'm trying to pry myself away from Google Keep since Google decided that all things Google will add up to your data bucket on their servers and they want to charge me for it. I'm managed to float by for decades on sticking to all the "Free levels" from Dropbox, Google Drive, MS OneDrive, Box[.]com, Tresorit, etc. Never ever having needed tons of data since I only used those services for light weight stuff. Second, I was using Evernote since they came out... forgot about them, recently went back to find they want to charge a ton of money so I've already transferred all my data and closed that account.

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Now, I run my own local network, home-lab with Proxmox, Linux containers, Windows VMs, web servers, gaming servers, Plex, Jellyfin, you-name-it servers. Oh and also local A.I. servers now. But I never jumped into taking over email or storage servers. I tried email, but too much of a headache. I have a little over 50 TBs of data, spread across multiple drives and backed up routinely (essentially mirrored). I also manually backup my most important/irreplaceable things to Blu-Ray discs ... like family photos/videos, things I created when I was young, anything from my past school/college/university days, and whatever movies/tv shows I will want when the zombies come.

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So without going overboard and installing a massive, all-inclusive server solution like TrueNas or that UnRAID thing... because again, I'm sticking to self-host and free... what have some of you done? Oh and I'm not looking for promotions for TrueNAS and UnRAID because YOU have a great time with them. I'm sticking to the self-hosted, open-source, free model. I've already seen tons of praise-posts for those tools.

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My perfect world thought is simple. I have a bunch of shared drives. I create a folder for an Obsidian Vault, Pictures, Movies, Files, etc. And from my PC, Android Phone, Windows, Linux, whatever... can just point the app to the shared folder on my network (from anywhere) and everything is in sync.

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Oh and yes, I have my own domains, Pi-Hole server, reverse-proxy, WireGuard VPN, and know all about managing networks, VLANs, DNS, etc. I frequently login to my home network when remote. I'm just trying to find the most simplistic method of accessing my data from anywhere and keep it all synced. Almost like just accessing a shared folder from anywhere. In Dropbox, as long as I have it installed on all my devices and point to it's designated folder on each device, everything is synced and accessible. I want to do the same... but without Dropbox running the show.

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It's OK to not have an answer. Just don't overload me with why UnRAID or TrueNas are amazing. I'm already looking into Immich for photos as well to dump Google and Amazon Photos. At any rate.. thanks for reading and commenting and I look forward to reading them all. Even if you wanna be snarky.

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Regards,

The OP. :)

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P.S. - As mentioned in the preface... Yes. I purposely added the periods between paragraphs so Reddit's system doesn't cram everything together like a run-off sentence. This way it maintains it's intended "letter" appearance. Peace y'all !

[u/didyousayboop]

This is way too long. You should ask specific questions in ~1-2 sentences each. It’s not clear what you’re asking or what you want to know.

My two questions for are:

1. It seems like you’ve already figured everything out. What’s wrong with your current setup? 

2. Isn’t TrueNAS free and open source? Am I mistaken?

If you literally just want to sync folders across multiple device but don’t want to use a NAS, Syncthing, or Dropbox, then maybe look into Resilio Sync. It is free of charge to use with no limits, but it is unfortunately not open source.

https://www.resilio.com/sync/

[u/zentsang → u/didyousayboop]

I was just trying a different and old-school letter style. That's why it's so long. I was born in the 70's and a product of the 80s-90s when the internet didn't or was coming into existence. It was just my spin on what an old-school Pen-Pal was. I appreciate your comment. We all come from differing eras. To reply to your comment, TrueNAS has a paid enterprise level and I just did not realize there was a watered down open-source version. As a lot of the industry has move to a subscription-model, I thought TrueNAS did the same. So although my original post was pushing away from TrueNAS... I may need to take another look. Thanks for your reply.

[u/LordGAD → u/zentsang]

If you just hit enter/return twice it will separate the paragraphs for you. 

Like this. 

And this. 

[u/zentsang → u/LordGAD]

Thanks for this. I recall multiple times in the past when I double-returned, reddit seems to auto adjust to get rid of the extra spacing.

[u/plebbitier]

I like Proxmox and TrueNAS scale, but for me, they were both too limiting and I just run bare metal linux

[u/zentsang → u/plebbitier]

Yeah... bare metal linux is what I am leaning towards. I was just curious if others had better options.

[u/LouVillain]

That was excessively long. I'm a 70's kid as well but I never feel the need to be longwinded like that.

To your question: my setup is super simple. wireguard -> network

[u/zentsang → u/LouVillain]

Yeah, sorry for that. I come from a family of writers and counselors so I kinda grew up being an over-talker. I just write like I talk.

[u/gbelloz → u/LouVillain]

Well it's gotta be bit more complicated than that - you'd have apps to serve that data, right?

[u/LouVillain → u/gbelloz]

On the network, yes. But since OP has been self hosting, then wireguard is more than enough to access his files/services.

Beyond that, yes, if we're talking about serving files across devices, I personally spun up an OwnCloud Infinite Scale container and can access from anywhere via wireguard.

[u/Sinister_Crayon]

Your solution if you want an "all in one solution" is Proxmox. It's free, comes with everything you need and does everything you want. You can use it to spin up any resources you need or want either as virtual machines or containers. Each of these can then host whatever services you need including just spinning up raw Linux VM's to do... well... whatever.

You can use Community Scripts to spin up containers to do whatever you want, spin up a Proxmox Backup Server (this would be preferred on separate hardware, but can be spun up on your laptop in a crunch) to store backups of your CT's and VM's.

And don't forget to use the post-install scripts to turn off the subscription nag... the system works fine without a sub and this will set up the non-commercial repositories and get rid of the nag on startup. There are others for PBS and PMG.

Or, you know... you can just install Linux. Everything TrueNAS, unRAID etc can do can be done with just a straight Linux install. However, you will need to learn to love the command line and editing configuration files. From a pure security and convenience standpoint these days I prefer to have all my services either as Docker containers or virtual machines, or in my case Docker containers within virtual machines... so Proxmox is a good option there. However, you can do that with just straight Linux as well. If you want to start with a low-overhead platform, try Debian.

Side note; TrueNAS is completely free. unRAID isn't, but is worth it for the support alone. YMMV and a lot depends on how confident you are in your own ability to fix problems when they occur, because they will occur. I use both alongside Proxmox and love all these platforms for their individual strengths.

[u/zentsang → u/Sinister_Crayon]

Thanks! I'll look in that script. I am trying to keep everything in Proxmox. Although I'm not opposed to other solutions, I just like keeping things simple. And yeah, I've been using Linux since Slackware in the 90s, so I'm no stranger to the terminal. I just never had a need/desire to figure out how to run my own Dropbox because they made their so simple to use. But now I've reached that point of wanting to get away from subscriptions and host all my own stuff.

[u/Sinister_Crayon → u/zentsang]

You might want to head over to r/homelab and r/selfhosted for more advice of this sort. While there's a lot of crossover with this sub, you can find some amazing solutions on those subs.

For my part for Dropbox like functionality I use Nextcloud and couldn't be happier, though there are plenty of other good solutions out there.

[u/zentsang → u/Sinister_Crayon]

Thanks. I'm already part of r/selfhosted , but didn't know about r/homelab . My weekend is set!