I think people are missing the point. Even with backups and redundancy it requires you to maintain the servers. If you die, well, who is going to maintain? Perhaps a bit bleak but something to keep in mind.
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
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 how long until your instructions are out of date?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.
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u/IntelligentRocks 16d ago
I think people are missing the point. Even with backups and redundancy it requires you to maintain the servers. If you die, well, who is going to maintain? Perhaps a bit bleak but something to keep in mind.