this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2024
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Any advice for a near (tech) illiterate newb on what to get? I only recently switched from using a patchwork of like 2 dozen different google drives to store all my stuff to a single nextcloud account through hertzner. But it costs per month, and that's always risky with my finances. Would love to learn how to do it myself, but don't know where to start. If it matters, I got the 5tb plan, and have 5 people on it (self included).
Here is how I (noobinoob) built my own Nextcloud-Server
Hardware: I took the old PC from my aunt, no idea about the specs. Added 4 x 8 TB NAS HDD drives and removed the graphics card, the onboard graphic from the CPU was enough. No raid-controller, just connected the hard drives to the motherboard. In future I can add a PCI-Card with more SATA-ports.
Software: I installed Linux Debian, put my 4 HDD drives in a btrfs-raid1 pool, encrypted them with LUCS, installed dropbear to ssh into my server when it is not started and unlocked yet, installed ddclient to update my domain with my home-IP and followed most (not all) of this guide to install nextcloud. Unfortunately, it is in german, but there are plenty of english intructions out there.
internet-stuff: I bought a domain (10 Euro/year) and set up DynDNS. I opened the neccessary ports on my router/firewall.
I had to look up a lot of things and failed many many times, but now it works and I am very happy with it - no downtime in the last year. It took about 6-12 months to get there.
In conclusion: Your way (nextcloud on hetzner) is the much better way. You save time and money and your data is more secure.
But if you want to learn a lot of new stuff, building your own server is fun.
I understood some of that! Mostly the things like "a," "the," "and," and other such technical terms. Lol
Is my data more secure on hertzner? I thought self hosting was supposed to be better for that?
It is safer in the sense that, when you selfhost, you have to take care of your own backups. You have to make sure your data is still there, even if two hard drives fail, or your house catches fire and your server burns down. Hertzner is doing that for you.
But you are right of course, from a privacy standpoint it would be much better to have your data on your own server and only send encrypted backups to a remote server like Hertzner.
That makes a lot of sense. I think I'd like to do it, eventually, if for no other reason than I am 33, and I feel like my time to learn this shit is slipping away pretty quickly sometimes, but maybe not for all my important stuff like family pictures. Start small and just make sure i can do it first, once I understand a little more
I started with 30, so not far off. My first step was to try to daily drive Linux. Best decision ever, working with a computer suddenly was fun and exciting again.
I've been daily driving fedora for a few years now, but I never really get deeper into anything than opening Firefox, and a few Gnome extensions. Haha