Ahem… take redundant storage setups built 30yrs ago and go check if these would make sense today. I challenge the fact even RAID would still mean something 30 years from now. Remember, we’ll have robots doing our dish washing at home in the next two years while we’ll enjoy having a ride round the city with our robotaxis.
Of course you can always maintain, upgrade, migrate, my point is it’s not done at low cost and forever setups do not exist, especially if you’d like contemporary best user experience.
well. Old stuff like that does not sound fancy to me. High end distributed storage systems have abandoned it. Similar concepts at software layer.
You seem very aware you’re launching a forever IT management agenda. You’re enjoying it, great, but once you don’t anymore, you’ll still have to deal with it.
Yes you do have to maintain & upgrade and yes its not low cost.
All good, you don’t need to do it, I just highlighted that there is a usecase which cannot be solved by cloud storage (happy to hear arguments against that part).
Basic paperwork, which I need to keep for legal/tax reasons, even accumulated over a lifetime and in scanned form would probably be a few gigabytes at best.
Photos and videos a few hundreds of gigabytes (thanks to increasing resolution on my phone camera), but I’m taking fewer photos now. With kids, I started taking more videos of them which really ate up disk space.
Own computer settings etc. I back up my computer to save its state. I guess, if I spent the time, I could figure out exactly where all the custom configurations are saved and save only that. On top of that there’s a whole bunch of custom programs I’ve written and services I’ve configured which take up a bit of space.
I think I would be able to save everything in 1TB or less. Though right now, it takes up more than that because I saved multiple snapshots in a very inefficient way. As I move to incremental backups, the space required should reduce.
I’m so happy not to have a computer anymore, and not to deal with these configs, program, tuned to every single bit stuff.
I used to compile Linux kernel and have my software rc files on a git repo.
Thing is, there is no such thing as digital life especially in what’s discussed here. There’s you choosing to use, tweak computers, make programs and accumulate (sometimes stolen) data. It’s not a necessity, it does not improve life, nor does it make you more efficient.
Because what’s you’ve optimized so well can easily be erased. Try it out.
I also have another opinion on the value given to personal pics and video content, but that’s very personal indeed.
Sorry not sorry, you won’t change my mind, owning paid content for free that people put energy, talent and money is something I would not accept for what I do. Whether there’s some tax on the drive it’s stored or not. Never been paid by that one.
Lets not focus on the selfhosting of media. The interesting part is managing your personal data in general. I have over 1TB in photos and videos and it‘s growing by the year.
Do you still use stuff like GoogleDrive/OneDrive for Word Documents/Spreadsheets etc?
I’m wondering if there is a lightweight self-hosted alternative e.g. you just have documents on a shared drive and edit them directly. Though I’d like something that supports versioning.
I’ve heard of stuff like NextCloud but wanted something that wasn’t a full-on application suite.
Oh. If you haven’t bought an automated scanner (ADF). Get one. That really helped me. As soon as I get any document. I scan it in and put the paper in a box. No more hunting around for documents. I just search the database now.
Actually, I run the following services on my computer:
Scanner/Document database
Personal Wiki
LLM and Web Interface for it
Jupyter notebook
AI text to speech service
Backups
PiHole for adblocking
This is what I use cloud services for:
Google Drive for documents: word, sheets
Google Drive for photos
Google Workspace for E-mail: I used to self-host my own email server for many years (since when I was still living in the UK) until Electricity prices meant that server costs were >£80 per month. Way cheaper to pay Google $6 per month instead.
Google drive costs $3 per month for 200GB. Email $6.
Interesting thread. I’ve been contemplating this kind of setup for my extended family. Not from a security perspective though, but simply on a cost basis vs. paid cloud services with ongoing fees.
That‘s actually a great project. I have all my important documents physically. Should I digitalize them and threw away the „originals“?
I looked into selfhosting alternatives but nothing comes closes to Google Sheets/Docs. I think I‘ll just keep using that as it works flawlessly and it‘s connected to my Gmail account anyway.
I keep them “just in case”. But it also makes the process easy: I have a slightly larger than A4 box which is next to the scanner. As soon as it is scanned, I drop it into the box. I figure there’s enough space for maybe 2000 pages in there. When it gets full (will take years) I’ll put it in the storage room and start with the next one.
Before I did this, it was a nightmare. I was forever hunting around for documents and spending a lot of time filing them into different folders. Now all stuff goes into the same box (or thrown away) and it saves a lot of time. It also has the advantage of having all physical documents chronological, so easy to find if I ever need to sift through (which I haven’t yet).
When I first got the ADF, I went on a bender and took all paper lying around my desk etc. and put them through the ADF. I spent a couple of hours doing this and felt great to clean up so much stuff. It could scan them faster than I could collect and feed the documents.
I also run OCR on it as they are scanned. Since my German isn’t so good, it helps that I can copy and paste these into a translator later.
My next steps are to hook it into my locally hosted AI to automatically tag, keyword and summarize/describe the documents to make searching even easier and or be able to ask the AI for stuff e.g. “How much do I need to pay Gemeinde tax?”: “Tax of XXYY is due on [date]. The document is here.”; or “Find all invoices from Primeo and extract the electricity and usage data. Plot the usage over time and also the electricity price changes over time”.
Do you have a special folder structure for your documents? Like receipts/warranty, taxes, other confirmations? What about diplomas or employement reference letters?
Nope. It all goes into one big folder. The folder is shared over NFS so I can access on all my machines connected by WireGuard. Most of time, I need to access just the most recent files, so I have it sorted with newest first and can quickly find what I need.
In case I need something older, I use a web interface which has search and preview capabilities to find documents.
The exception is for tax relevant documents: I have 3 buttons on the scanner. I have one for tax so when I press that, the document gets duplicated to a tax folder. So when the time comes, I can sort through that tax folder and drag and drop the required documents into the tax software.
My plan is to use AI to tag and categorize and I will do all searches with a database. So the organization will be virtual via tags and metadata, rather than folder-based, which is more limiting.
I currently search just using keywords on the OCR data embedded into the PDF. Which works well enough. But I will extend to add filters such as date etc.
I’ve written the software for this with the help of AI.
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