this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2025
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UPDATE: To everyone who suggested YUNO, thank you so much. This seems like it is about to make my journey much easier. It is basically almost exactly what I was looking for, but I was unaware that it existed.
Thank you ALL for your suggestions, actually. It's a bit overwhelming for an almost complete noobie but I an going to look into all of the suggestions in time. I just saw that there were several mentions of YUNO so I decided to make that one of the first things I investigated.

So, about two months ago, I had a very eye opening experience. As the result of a single misconfigured security setting on my Android, I was locked out of my Google Account on my phone AND all of my PCs. I had no access whatsoever to Google, or any of the literally hundreds of services that I get through Google.

This is when I realized that I relied entirely on Google/Android because those two days were actually very difficult, being cut off from media, services, passwords, everything, from the past almost twenty years of my life, could be taken away from me in an instant. The decades of my life that were locked away in my Google Account included hundreds of thousands of pictures, almost a hundred thousand audio tracks, several hundred books, several hundred apps, thousands of videos, etc. ad infinitum. Unfortunately, very little of this material was backed up at that point. That is my fault. Also, the misconfigured security setting was my fault as well.

The amount of data, media, memories, services, etc. that would have been lost is actually endless and it would have affected my life in several ridiculously negative ways.

Luckily, in the end, I was able to get my access back and then basically immediately grabbed all of the several terabytes of information and media of mine that they had, and that I was almost locked out of. I have it all in my house now on a drive in my computer, with a backup made on another disconnected disk.

I then decided that no corporation was ever going to have such an insanely high level of influence on and control over my entire life and my media ever again. That experience was actually very scary.

I've been trying to get into SelfHosting, but am finding it quite daunting and difficult.

There is a LOT of stuff that I have to learn, and I am mostly unsure of where to even begin. I know basically nothing about networking.

I need to learn the very basic stuff and work my way up from there, but everything that I've seen on the Internet assumes that the reader already has a basic to intermediate understanding of networking and the subjects that surround it. I do not, but I am going to learn.

I just need someone to show me where to start.

Thanks in advance for any assistance!

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[–] SidewaysHighways@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

get your password situation squared away! every time i spin something new up i am grateful to have a pw manager to keep it all unique and maximum character limit

don't even have to memorize the user of a lot of em

[–] MTZ@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

That's the only thing that I do have taken care of! I basically immediately grabbed them out of Chrome and put them in KeePassXC on my PCs and KeePassDX for my Android.

Baby steps!

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[–] oeuf@slrpnk.net 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Check out YUNOhost - it's pre-configured for you and designed for beginners. Mine's been running for about three years on a VPS with no problems and I had no previous experience with self-hosting.

Definitely keep your files backed up locally though. No server is invincible.

[–] MTZ@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I will certainly look into that. I've never heard of YUNOhost but I'm going to give it a look soon!

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[–] mushroommunk@lemmy.today 2 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

That econdary drive I highly recommend you find a way to move that out of your house. For me I have a friend 8 hours away, we swap drives on occasion to keep each other's backups in case of flood/fire/toddler or whatever other force of nature to save ourselves cloud backup costs

[–] MTZ@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

That's a great idea. I've had a safety deposit box for years. I can just store it in there!

[–] tburkhol@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago

Safe deposit box is exactly the right size to hold a 3.5" HDD. Or several. I keep a backup Yubikey there too, because I love the physical token 2FA, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to lose it.

[–] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 2 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

I think the very first step to building resiliency is to sign up for Proton's cloud services. That will give you access to mail, both from Gmail via forwarding and a new inbox with a separate address. You'd also get a password manager and cloud storage. From there you can start self-hosting alternatives. Probably start with Immich as Google Photos is a big deal and it takes a ton of storage. Proton is a Swiss non-profit so the probability for enshitification is not nearly as high as with Google.

As soon as you have redundant storage, do a Google Takeout and download a full archive of your stuff. This feature may not be there for long given the current corporate climate.

[–] MTZ@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago

Thanks, I will certainly look into this after I get some sort of basic understanding of the concepts at play.

[–] olafurp@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago

I'd recommend starting by hosting a nextcloud instance.

  1. Get a desktop computer, pretty much anything will do but having room to add more HDD is important.
  2. Install Linux distro like Ubuntu or something
  3. Get a static IP so your IP doesn't change
  4. Setup a router port forwarding rule so that an outside address points to your nextcloud instance.

Then do some optional steps:

  • Automatically turn on PC when power comes back on (BIOS setting)
  • Startup script that runs nextcloud on startup
  • Install docker to manage services like nextcloud
  • Add some remote desktop thingy to manage your server from your laptop (ssh is also good but a steeper learning curve)
  • Get a NAS for storing data with redundancy.
  • Have some other form of backup like your current Google account, cloud provider or one of your mates with a similar setup.

That's pretty much what you need to start hosting your own files, then later on you can setup a email server, media server like Jellyfin, homepage and everything.

Just go one step at a time and when you hit an issue you can and should ask Google or ChatGPT. Remember, everything exposed to the Internet is vulnerable so take security seriously. Always have everything protected by a decently long password, pairing requirement with your server confirming adding a device or an API key.

[–] q7mJI7tk1@lemmy.world 0 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Backup. I use Backblaze personal which is $179 for two years of 'unlimited' storage. All my important self hosted data is duped to some old 2.5" external drives connected to my work machine that then is backing up to Backblaze. I also have 1yr retention, so any deleted file is accessible for up to 1yr.

After backups are sorted, stick with the OS you know best. If Windows (I hope not), then HyperV for VMs is good. Try the official Nextcloud VM from Hanson IT. Nextcloud is a good catch-all, but it's beaten by other specific tools. I now host all I need from specific Docker containers: photos, calendar, email backup etc etc

But I would say Docker. Docker desktop if Macos or Windows if your thing. Get to know docker and the world of self hosting is your oyster.

As what others say, keep it all to your home network and tread carefully when trying to remote access it all.

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