bluGill

The bigger point about cloud that most miss is make sure you are paying them a reasonably price for the service. So long as you are the customer and not the product the cloud can be good.

First question: what will you do about data backup? Nextcloud and Immich both imply important data that you don’t want to lose. You say you have some harddrives, so look for some computer that can take more than one harddrive and then setup RAID with snapshots. I’d go for a RAID setup such that you need two drives to fail before you lose data, but there are plenty of debate. We often say RAID is not a backup - you should start thinking about the next step in your backup setup soon.

Used vs new is always the question. In general the newer the system the less power it will use to do the same work. However ARM will almost always use less power than x86 even if the x86 is much newer. I specified work here, your computer will nothing most of the time so idle power matters too.

How small? I bought a N100 system from Protectli which I’m happy with. It should work better than a pi according to the specs - but I never tried a pi so I can’t say if it really is. However this is bigger than a pi. I have an old system76 Meerkat, which is much smaller (I think this is the NUC form factor?), but my system is 8 years old and so not really comparable to anything modern, but that is an option.

Depends on what is inside, intel N100 or better CPUS are considered really good in general. There are some bad CPUs in mini-PCs though. Make sure the hardware has drivers for your choosen OS, not everything supports linux [well] even today. And every once in a while someone makes a PC with bad design and so it doesn’t work well for technical reasons.

There are a lot of small PCs that are low power that will work well. I haven’t used GMKTech’s, and one look at their website says I won’t try to navigate that mess. (why does everyone need a subscribe to our newsletter popup blocking my ability to see anything - I avoid anyone who abuses me like that)

Validating restore is one of the harder things. There are some people who restore means it works on the exact same hardware - commonly hardware vendors will change internal details without changing model numbers so this plan often fails when it turns out the computer restore to is slightly different and so you don’t have the right driver on your backup (My dad used to repair computers for people who did this - he often charged thousands of dollars to fix a 10-30 year old machine that a new PC could run circles around. IIRC most of the machines were HPUX and not PCs so the cost of porting to a new machine was ). Most people figure they will be replacing the computer with something newer and so instead install the latest OS and then restore just files, now you face the question of do you restore applications or not?

I would test restore on a cheap raspberry-pi, assuming the backup is from x86, or on a cheap ebay x86 if the backup is from ARM. For most self hosted people this is really what they want to know can be done because they don’t know what the replacement hardware will be. The goal here isn’t a usable system, it is enough that you can show your files still exist.

Well for sure that is better than nothing, so since you have it keep doing it until/unless you have something better.

Your next task is to make sure you can restore the data. Since the data is - probably - saved, you have good odds. Practice restoring means that when a computer breaks you will faster be able to get the replacement running again. Practice also means in the off chance something isn’t saved you find out about it while your old computer is still running.

Then we need to think about threats.

Ransomware that encrypts your disk will encrypt that shared drive too. I don’t know what unraid offers, but you should enable read-only snapshots (now practice restoring them!), and save those snapshots. Ideally you want some pattern like all backups for a week, then 1 backup a week for a month, then 1 backup a month for a year, and 1 backup a year for the next 7 years. This way you can just go back to before the ransomware and restore from backups.

You might delete one file on accident. You are likely not to realize it for a while. One more reason for the pattern saved above. Make sure you can restore individual files.

Your house might burn down destroying all computers. You want a copy of all that data someplace else, maybe more than one someplace elses. Though perhaps you only want a yearly and weekly copy. If the data is encrypted (very good idea for off site!) make sure the key is saved someplace else secure where you can find it - a key you can remember is a bad key so thought about how to save the key is important.

You might die or become mentally disabled with important files that your heirs need. Pictures, wills, tax/bank data (including passwords!). document the above well enough that someone else can at least figure it out. Ideally you would know someone unrelated to you into computers and leave them a lot of money ($5000?) to figure out your system and get your heirs the important files after you die. (this should be a great business opportunity, but odds are not enough people will pay for it)

There are a lot of variations I didn’t think of, but I think I covered enough to start you out. You get to decide how far you go. I’m not far enough myself, but at least I have one backup in my RAID.

One last thought - you might have some data you don’t want backed up. If you delete the evidence of your crime but the backups are there they can get you. Your secret porn collection might be legal, but still not something you want your heirs to find out about, maybe keep it in a different way? Your call here.

Jellyfin is on his nas which we assume has more power.

streaming what? Streaming one mp3s. Streaming a dozen different video re-encoded to something else probably can’t be done any affordable machine.

Maybe. How much does it use when you use it? For lightly used servers idle power matters. However a modern CPU often uses much less power to get the same amount of work done and so if the server is doing something idle consumption isn’t important.

You could do that too. I’m not old enough to punch cards but that doesn’t need to stop you.

Write your gcode by hand and you can do curves thus ensuring lines won’t meet. I last wrote gcode by hand in the 1990s, and I’m pretty sure industry stopped hand gcode around 2000 (before 3d printing), but the language isn’t difficult and so you can do it.

Use something other than FDM 3d printing - SLA (resin) printers have higher resolutions and will not have those issues. Or you could put a solid sheet of plastic on a mill and use subtractive machining to make your parts. There are a few other options.

All options have pros and cons, and your best answer might be just live with it (see other replies for ways to mitigate the issues). However don’t get locked into 3d printing just because it is the “in” thing.

Self hosting will always remain a hobby thing. Most people won’t give the time need to properly admin their own system and an improperly admined system is a risk that you don’t want to take with your precious data. I can’t blame people for not doing this - there are ball games to watch, saw dust to make, kids to raise, and millions of other things to do with your free time such that you cannot do everything you might want to. Sure most people could learn to do this, but it isn’t a good use of their time.

What the world needs is someone trustworthy and cheap enough to handle data for people who have better things to do. Which is why I have fastmail handle my email. I self host a lot of other things though because I don’t know of anyone I can trust to do a good job for a reasonable price.

Ubuntu has gone downhill a lot in the last decade. I no longer can recommend it. Yes there is a large community, but they make too many questionable decisions and so doing anything “different” will be hard.

You can run docker in docker. I do that all the time (but via scripts so I know it does docker in docker, but I don’t know how they do that).

But again, I wasn’t even trying to run HA in docker, I was running in a VM container and still the above is refused by default.

Maybe, but the documentation says it can’t be done.

note too that I wasn’t running docker but instead a vm.

https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/ Home assistant container - the version for docker - doesn’t support add-ons. If you go through a lot of effort you can make it work, but you won’t get help. (easiest is to install some linux in the docker and then home assistant supervised on top of that)

There is no reason HAOS couldn’t run just fine in a container (qemu not docker), but they intentionally detect that and break it (I tried, I probably could make it work but I don’t have that much time)

Home Assistant insists that it must run on bare metal hardware and will not work well. This is a purely artificial limitation that home assistant puts on you. You can work around it with a lot of effort, or the limitations might not matter to you, but it is a limit to be aware of. I personally went to OpenHAB instead, but YMMV.

Since you have Proxmox why would you switch? If you don’t like it, then by all means, there are lots of other options. However there is a good reason Proxmox comes up a lot. (I don’t personally use Proxmox so I don’t know those reasons, but the people who recommend it give every indication they are smart people who understand the problem and so I trust them enough to say it is a good option)

Best is a subjective question. There is no objective way to say what is best. We can argue about pros and cons. We can argue about what we prefer. However that is all subjective and there is no one best answer.

Cool build, but a little reading in how mills and lathes are made would result in a much better machine. The Gingery machine shop series is cheap and good to read even if you don’t want to pour aluminum - his machines also make some bad compromises, but the books also inform you of things that would make you do machines like this different if you knew them.