I’m in the means of buying a mini pc for selfhosting stuff. My main reasons are sailing the high seas for movies and series and hosting my families photos, videos to escape gdrive. I’m thinking about some kind of DMS / digitalizing paperwork and mail in the future.
I casually look into all kinds of software that could do the task and now I’m a bit overwhelmed. Is owncloud or an alternative enough, or do I need something more elaborated like TrueNAS? But all the NAS Foss stuff seems to run on their own OS. Can my Pirate Ship run on that? I feel like the diversity of solutions is making this very opaque for me.
If you have an old laptop sitting around, put a linux server or NAS distro on it and start tinkering. There can be a lot of analysis paralysis with this stuff. Sometimes it’s best to just try and fail and learn and try again. More likely you’ll try and succeed and realize other wants and needs and redo it a year later. I think that’s why it makes for a great hobby. Lots to learn and improve upon.
Start small, on your local network. Maybe something like paperless-ngx: not very demanding of resources, and (I assume) easy to backup/migrate. You could see about putting it on truenas to get a sense of what that process is like. I personally like to keep a nas and server separate, then mount the nas on the server.
I’ve found owncloud a bit complex and prefer dedicated solutions. For the seas, servarr apps come up a lot. Paperless ngx for docs. Immich (or ente) for photos/vid. If you’re just starting out, installing on linux and/or using docker is going to be your shortest path to success. proxmox or other VMs can complicate things if you’re not familiar.
This has been my path so far, nearly to a T. Got an old laptop, installed endeavour with a very light DE and attached an external drive and started messing with *arrs and jellyfin and bunch of other things.
The only downside is that my family now relies on that for watching so I’m more careful of not breaking the stuff that works.
Got another laptop that had no use so I started playing around on it. Installed Debian and CasaOS on top to test if that would be a nice alternative.
The only real issue is the lack of time to spend on this.