this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2024
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I saw this post today on Reddit and was curious to see if views are similar here as they are there.

  1. What are the best benefits of self-hosting?
  2. What do you wish you would have known as a beginner starting out?
  3. What resources do you know of to help a non-computer-scientist/engineer get started in self-hosting?
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[–] schizo@forum.uncomfortable.business 61 points 3 months ago (20 children)

The big thing for #2 would be to seperate out what you actually need vs what people keep recommending.

General guidance is useful, but there's a lot of 'You need ZFS!' and 'You should use K8s!' and 'Use X software!'

My life got immensely easier when I figured out I did not need any features ZFS brought to the table, and I did not need any of the features K8s brought to the table, and that less is absolutely more. I ended up doing MergerFS with a proper offsite backup method because, well, it's shockingly low-complexity.

And I ended up doing Docker with a bunch of compose files and bind mounts, because it's shockingly low-complexity. And it's just running on Debian, instead of some OS that has a couple of layers of additional software to make things "easier" because, again, it's low-complexity.

I can re-deploy the entire stack on new hardware in about ~10 minutes (I've tested this a few times just to make sure my backup scripts work), and there's basically zero vendor tie-in or dependencies that you'd have to get working first since it's just a pile of tarballs and packages from the distro's package manager on, well, ANY distro.

[–] randint@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Can you elaborate on how your backup script re-deploys on new hardware? Sounds very nice to have.

[–] schizo@forum.uncomfortable.business 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

elaborate

It's a really simple script.

Everything is deployed with a docker compose, and all the docker volume data are bind mounts and, for example, a Jellyfin install would have everything in /stacks/jellyfin.

The backup script makes a tarball of each service individually (and stops the stack if there's anything in there doing database things or anything else that might end up being inconsistent by just archiving the filesystem), and uploads them to a S3 storage provider AND burns them to a BluRay.

The recovery script does the opposite: it downloads and unarchives the data.

As long as you're on Linux and have Docker, it should just magically work.

[–] randint@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I see! Thanks, will try to back up my docker compose services this way.

If you write the script yourself, just make sure you test it a couple of times, and preferably with different datasets from different runs.

I found some edgecase stuff that would have prevented a restore even after I had tested it successfully (some permission issues due to changes in containers and whatnot were resulting in less than the expected data being archived and restored) a couple of times.

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