I am technologically skilled to some extent, but not nearly enough to justify the financial investment I’m about to make In a home server without checking that I’m not way off the mark. Reddit tech answers are usually useless, all jerking each other off about being the most vague and useless. So I’m here, just humbly asking if my plan will work before I waste a ton of money if it doesn’t.

So I want to run immich, jellyfin, vaultwarden, and a couple other small programs (including backup automation) on a home server. The photos and videos are very important and I want off of large corporate cloud services for all the reasons you can imagine. There are about 2TB of important photos and data right now to backup.

So my plan: a mini pc with a low-level i3 or i5 chip but about 256gb SSD and 8gb ram. I will buy a UPS, a hub/NAS for 2 4TB HDDs, and a separate hub for backups elsewhere on another 4TB HDD. I already have a pc with an ok graphics card (only like 8 years old, but it was above average then) and good processor. My plan is to run the server with Linux, docker, and portainer on the mini-pc, and do the most intensive work (things like local Machine Learning on the photo library in immich) on the gaming pc. To save on energy, the mini pc is the only thing on most of the time, and I will turn on the old gaming pc to do the hard tasks.

I am hoping a friend will allow me to (somehow? I don’t know how yet) keep a hub+HDD backup at their place which is updated weekly automatically whenever their computer turns on.

Is this all achievable? Am I missing something small or huge? Any tech people here know something that I’ll likely miss on my first attempt?

  • Chana [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    2·
    19 days ago

    You need 3 copies, technically. If 1 out if 3 disagrees with the other 2 then the 1 gets overwritten. It doesn’t have to be disc level, you can do this on one drive (I actually do this sometimes to get error correction on system drives), but if you’re setting up redundant discs anyways you want to play to the strengths of those systems by getting e.g. a 3 way disc mirror.

    Technically some systems can get away with two copies and some careful hashing tricks but best not to think about that for this use case.

    • DutchMZTer [none/use name]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      2·
      19 days ago

      So this means 3 drives for mirroring in my system and then still 1 at a different location to make sure it’s safe from fires if I want to avoid clouds… damn

      • Chana [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
        2·
        18 days ago

        Yeah basically you want to plan for what happens if a drive fails. With a 3-way mirror you have 2 redundant drives so when you need to replace a drive it rapidly copies from those 2 and gets you back up and running. Drive health is correlated so the most likely time for another drive to go down is during this rebuild. If a drive does go down during a rebuild, you’re still okay so long as that last drive makes it. 2 redundant is plenty to make rebuilding a 3-way mirror basically guaranteed.

        Keep in mind this is just keeping you running and isn’t a backup, but I think that + error correction makes it worth it for any nas with data you care about.

          • Chana [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
            1·
            18 days ago

            Is that for 1 or 2 extra HDDs?

            I usually target refurbished drives on ebay from a reliable seller. They’re used and have a lower lifetime but are usually about half price and that’s good enchanting for me.

              • Chana [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
                2·
                18 days ago

                Oh dang that sucks. I stocked up on a great deal a while back to avoid needing to buy anything for hopefully like 15 years. Not bragging, more like if you have the option to be patient you can sometimes find good deals. Though with a likely fuel crunch it might be good to try something soon.

                I do believe you can get error correcting with a btrfs 2 way mirror, you just lose that redundancy for a rebuild. Your backups are more important than the nas redundancy, so that could be a good trade-off. Plus you can add a drive later if you find a good deal and it’ll be fairly easy to turn it into 3-way. I think zfs might be able to do this as well but I’m less certain there. I use ZFS for bulk storage because the erasure coding modes offer great density but I use dup and raid modes with btrfs for system / fast drives and it’s rock solid. I do recommend staying away from erasure coding on btrfs though (raid 6 etc), it’s unstable.