Self-hosting services has been a life-changer. And I thank this community for helping me a lot recently. Not only did I learn a lot more about linux, network and docker, but it helped me understand better how platforms and advertising just f*cked up the internet I grew up with.
But I wonder: do any of you hate how self-hosting services like photo- or document-management systems, or even a simple rss tool, forces you to sort your stuff out, and put your decades old files in order?!
I’m in the process of migrating my web browser bookmarks to linkding because it’s a GREAT tool. But I have like 2k websites to manualy check wether they’re still there, wonder at how cool they still are, tag properly and archive with SingleFile!
And that’s just ONE service…
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I hate having to run my own backups. That’s been a massively hidden cost behind self hosting that I did not originally account for. Anything sufficiently robust is expensive and anything cheap is unreliable (at least at the scales of data I have, 4k+ RAW videos and photos are massive).
Does it still count as “self hosting” if one of your backups uses something like restic to push to b2 or hetzner storage boxes? It’s not consumer point and click.
I have one copy going there, and one going to a $50 thinkstation usff connected to a single external hard drive. It’s not raid, but if it dies, it just gets quickly replaced while I rely on the hosted backup.
It’s important to use services with a workflow that works for you; not every popular service is going to be a good fit for everyone. Find your balance between exhaustive categorization and meaningless pile of data, and make sure you’re getting more out than you’re putting in. If you do decide that an extensive amount of effort is worth it, make sure that the service in question is able to export your data in a data-rich format so that you won’t have to do it all again if you decide to move to a different tool.
Thanks for mentioning SingleFile. I’m not using it right now.
The workflow with linkding and the linkding injector is gold.
Karakeep. It will throw an error if a website is down and you won’t get tags.
Are you kidding me? True, there is time involved. My biggest ‘sin’ right now is “home gallery” for it works on MY directory structure which I won’t give up.
The geoguessing game that hides in it is superb ! I’m still amazed with the images I’ve been able to locate. Sometimes 40 years back.
Idk. My folders are always decently organized since I’ve been nutty about since I was a kid, but the specific file structures different services can demand is a headache. This is why I prefer more simplistic services without a database, but there’s always trade-offs to be had with both options.
I’m a bit split on it, but I do agree that it can be annoying and when you mess up, services and links you’ve sent to other people don’t work and it can be quite agonizing. It’ll probably get better for me as time goes on, but man it can bite at times.
I guess the trick is to not look for stuff to host because you’ll end up with all kinds of things you weren’t doing in the first place.
And so little time!
do any of you hate how self-hosting services like photo- or document-management systems, or even a simple rss tool, forces you to sort your stuff out, and put your decades old files in order?!
What is this “sort” thing you speak of? I don’t sort anything, I have NextCloud syncing my entire photos, videos and documents folders and they are just as messy as ever. Granted, I do go through my photos and videos once a year and dump them in a folder named for the year they were taken. Occasionally, I’ll go hog wild and try to sort some of a year’s photos/videos into folders named after events. Though, that hasn’t happened in a number of years. I setup NextCloud so I could have everything synced to my own server and just forget, not have to deal with labeling my data.
As for bookmarks. I already keep those in folders; but, I don’t sync those. I use my desktop far more than I use my phone for web browsing. And the types of things I use my phone for (mostly recipes), I just keep bookmarked there.
It looks like we found another person that’s immune! Sample their blood
Simplify as much as you can.
And remember, if you’re also self-hosting for family, someone will need to take over all that software and digital clutter when you’re gone.
I’ve been trimming as much as I can on my NAS, including only keeping the most important self-hosted software and heavily purging old files and backups.
This. I’m not that old yet, but the realization hit me in the face pretty hard. And all the more reasons to sort it out. And definitely simplify. Or “make it usable” let’s say.
You don’t even have to be old. Death or serious illness/injury can affect us at any age, and it would suck if your family lost access to all the self-hosted photos and videos, for example.
“Make it usable” is a great idea.
Scaryyyy !
I just very recently discovered that bitwarden (vaultwarden) has this perfect feature like a “trusted contact” (not sure) where you can choose a person that can request access to your password vault, and if you DON’T answer in X days (configurable), they get access.
And you can put a secure note in there that has all the instructions necessary for them to access anything they might need (either by taking that note to someone skilled enough to follow the instructions, or by making it dead simple enough for them to just extract everything to an empty external ntfs hard drive in a simple file hierarchy).
Nothing better than a properly formatted data file.
Self hosting teaches you thisIf you really access them that infrequently, are they actually worth keeping?
Plus if they’re links, how many still work?
Actualy a lot more than I thought, and they bring joy, as souvenirs :)
I just moved 20k bookmarks from Pocket to Readeck, and can sympathize lol. A lot of the links are dead. I found a cleanup script I’m going to run but it’s still a huge curation challenge
There is a hidden cost to every hobby and everybody is willing to tolerate a certain degree of shittyness.
I have a friends that has a rather old car and something on it is always broken. But he has no problem having 20 different apps for appliances, instead of deploying home assistants. Or having ads everywhere and even trying pihole or at least NextDNS.
On the other hand, I see my car as a transportation tool and when I need it I want to use it without worrying about some random part exploding. But I have no problem running Proxmox and hosting tons of services for my family.
That said, I would definitely not self-host something like NextCloud or any business critical component for my business and just paid somebody for the service.
I do both - older vehicles always needing attention, and self-hosting shit
I just spun up Lube Logger so I feel this haha
You understand the value of risk management.
2k bookmarks? i would just automate the process of saving each of them locally and just forget it lol. if it’s somehow needed later search on the older archive
2000 Websites? WTF why?
