The weekend is here and it's time to continue our self-hosting journey! This weekend we'll be focusing on getting some standalone cloud storage and media servers up and running in your home lab.
Launch your own cloud storage
One of the best parts of a home lab is owning your files and the storage in which those files are stored. So, if you're ready to ditch Google Drive or Dropbox, then hosting your own cloud storage server is a fantastic project to start this weekend. I personally hold Next cloud the instance is running my server Unraid (I installed it there a long time ago and just never moved it), but you can run Nextcloud on almost anything. There are official Docker and virtual machine images, as well as web installers. NextcloudPiSnap package and much more.
Indeed, Nextcloud (or other services such as Marine file) can run on almost any hardware you have. With Nextcloud in particular, you'll get experiences very similar to Google Drive or Dropbox, with support for multiple users, online collaboration, sharing, and more.
Nextcloud not only runs on your local hardware, but also uses your own local storage. This means you won't have to pay $20 a month for 2TB of Google Drive storage and can use your own storage server instead. If I didn't use my server for media, I would have 60 TB of cloud storage.
Now, if you store files locally at home, the RAID you have installed on your storage server is a great start for redundancy, but this is not a real backup. You need to make sure you have an external copy of your data somewhere. Typically, I'd recommend something like the BackBlaze B2 storage, which costs $6 per terabyte per month to store.
However, if you want to store your files entirely in the public cloud, I would recommend setting up a secondary storage server at a friend's house – ideally on the other side of the country if possible. Having a second server for backup will ensure data integrity in the event of a natural disaster or catastrophic event. The farther it is from your main server, the better, since the likelihood of it being damaged at the same time as the main system is minimal.
Setting up Nextcloud can range from quite simple if you are using Nextcloud AIO to quite complex if you are trying to deploy services individually (in my experience). So, this project can definitely fill a weekend, but at the end, you'll be able to say goodbye to cloud storage providers and have complete control over your files (and wallet).
- Expenses
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For free
- Operating platforms
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Docker, Linux, Windows, macOS
Nextcloud is a cloud storage provider that uses your own hardware and storage space. It offers full-featured cloud collaboration capabilities for files, documents, and more, giving you an enterprise environment at no extra cost.
The great thing about hosting and creating a home lab yourself is how versatile your equipment becomes. The same system that runs your file server and other services may also store your personal media files.
More than ten years ago I turned on my first Plex media server and since then one of them has been working at my home. I used to have huge library of physical media. Every time a new 4K Blu-ray came out, I bought it. I would pre-order the latest issues so I can get the steel books too.
However, I hated having to take out each disc and put it in the Blu-ray player. I felt it might be damaged and to me they are collectibles. So I bought a good 4K capable Blu-ray drive for my desktop computer and started I copy movies to my computer, so I could watch them anywhere without having to take out a physical disc..
Yes, these Blu-ray discs had (and still have) codes for adding movies to a digital library like iTunes or Amazon Video. However, those online copies are much lower quality than the disc version, so ripping to my hard drive and streaming from there gave me much higher quality.
To this day, I use Plex for media consumption. Over the years, I've added many of my favorite old TV shows to my Plex server so I can re-watch classics like Home improvement, Monk, Psycheand many more without having to search for the DVD that is currently in a box in the attic somewhere.
Setting up Plex (or Jellyfish, Embyor Cody) is quite simple and only takes a few minutes. The longest part is digitizing your physical media collection, which can take a few minutes for smaller libraries and a few days for larger ones.
However, once you digitize everything, you can stream your content to any TV in your home without paying anyone a penny. It's a very liberating feeling that I think every DIYer should experience.
- Brand
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Plex
- Free trial
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Free version available
With Plex, you can maintain a single watch list for any movie or TV show you hear about on any service, even in theaters! You can finally stop switching between watchlists on all your other streaming services and add it all to Plex instead.
If you're tired of curating and using algorithm-based feeds, then RSS is perfect for you. Developed many years ago, RSS is a way to view your favorite content without algorithms.. Almost every major website or blog offers an RSS feed of their articles for you to browse and read.
FreshRSS is a modern RSS reader that you can host yourself, avoiding some of the more modern clients like Feedly, which uses an algorithm and other AI-powered features to simply read RSS. With FreshRSS you are in complete control.
Just deploy FreshRSS Docker containerenter the RSS feeds you want to track and start enjoying content without algorithms.
- Supported desktop browsers
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All
- Brand
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FreshRSS
FreshRSS is a standalone RSS reader and aggregator that helps you consume the content you need. That old Raspberry Pi sitting in your closet, lightweight and running on your own hardware, is the perfect candidate to run your new RSS reader.
Creating a home lab environment is such a fun activity that I think all tinkerers should play with it. These are just a few things you can do in your home lab. Not sure what's in the home lab? Indeed, if you have one computer at home and run your own services on it, you have a home lab – you don't need a full-fledged data center in the office.
Once you have started these services, here is a few more Docker containers I think all home workers should work hard to give you a well-rounded self-hosting experience.
