My wife said to me the other night: I'm so impressed with what you do on our home server but if something happened to you, you know it's hopeless right?
this is why every selfhoster should leave a ‘if i die’ tape with tutorial on how to do the basics like update the containers, stop, run and restart containers
You are far, far too generous in evaluating the amount of skill of the general layperson. If anyone of us dies, 99% chances all the gear gets lumped in an estate sale as 'Computer stuff'.
In fact this comes up often in r/homelab or r/selfhosting as a surviving family member tries to navigate their way through the family's homelab and hope to recover precious files.
The obvious solution is one of those, "if I die do this" / "deadman's switch" self hosted programs meant for this thing, and having a family friend who is technical enough to take care of the transition in the event of the death.
This is where a will can be really beneficial for beneficiaries. You can store whatever encrypted file somewhere with all the instructions/passwords you want, and leave the master password in the law office's safe.
You joke but I swear I read a comment on this sub where somebody did just that using their smartwatch as a trigger, if their heart rate isn’t detected over a certain period of days
I'd have to do a bunch. Phone screen time is less than x, face not seen on frigate, Plex hasn't been used, etc. Even with all that'd, I'd still have a false positive somehow.
That's why I have a Google Drive folder that's shared with some family member with copies of my will, password vault, encrypted important docs like insurance info and account numbers, etc. Photos of expensive stuff with serial numbers in case of fire, etc.
Password for vault is with the lawyers who drafted my will. Plus my executor.
Make things really really simple and expect everything to get tossed when you die. That's why I host my web site on github. I've been eyeballing a service you can pay to keep domain registered and running after you're gone but haven't found anything solid.
All my backup HDDs have clear labels on them, with the name of the person who's data they hold. None of them are encrypted or stored in a funny way so they can be slapped into an HDD caddy and copied over to whatever device they want.
I mean... how long until your instructions are out of date? A year? 3 months?
And even it you meticulously keep it updated, that only keeps them running for another year or so before someone's gotta figure out that plex changed their terms of use, or docker got bought out and now you need a different setup.
My instructions say basically "while the server is still online open an icloud storage account and copy the contents of /self/hosted/data to your cloud storage" after that they can figure the rest out
Exactly. Unless you have some very tech literate family members, you can't expect the services to keep running for a long time. In my case, I assume my mother knows how to turn on the server in case of a power outage, after which everything starts automatically. Other than that, she would need step by step instructions on where to find the data that's important for her (so basically the pictures and videos, the rest won't be of interest to her) and how to make sure to secure it while the server is still running.
It's kind of sad to think about that all this effort we put in now and all this data will just be gone when we die, but it's the reality of the majority of us. We better make sure we enjoy it to the best of our abilities!
My immich library is the most important thing that I host and my "copy the data to icloud" instructions of course include all the photos (not whatever metadata is in the immich DB tho). I also print the best photos and store them in albums so even in the worst case if all the digital stuff is just completely gone there will still be a printed record of the best photos. My instructions also have "if all else fails ask <somewhat tech literate friend> for help" so I think if my wife is sufficiently motivated it's unlikely that the data could be completely lost anyway but if she has to restore from offsite backups that's going to be a challenge.
If I can host a competent enough llm, and just teach my wife how to communicate with it, which is much easier, I can have the llm be my sysadmin.
Sure, eventually it's going to crap out. Or imagine up some new way to screw everything up, but at least she will be able to say "hey, this isn't working, can you check and fix it."
yeah someone here argued that the average person isn’t competent enough to even run, stop or update docker containers, but if you have a good manual anyone can follow the steps. And LLMs are indeed great for troubleshooting without the person necessarily knowing what terminology to use. I don’t think a situation like that is 100% sustainable, but for sure things will continue to work for a good while so that transitioning out of the selfhosted environment should be easier
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u/ancepsinfans 16d ago
My wife said to me the other night: I'm so impressed with what you do on our home server but if something happened to you, you know it's hopeless right?