Running my own services at home instead of relying on big-tech clouds.
Everything runs in Docker on a small home server: photo backup, file sync, a password manager, notes, media streaming, DNS and monitoring, all behind a reverse proxy with SSL. These posts cover how I set each piece up and what I learned along the way.
Posts
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My 3-2-1 backup plan (and the gaps I found)
An honest look at what my home server backs up today, the gaps I found, and how a new 10 TB drive…
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Scrutiny: catching failing hard drives before they die
Scrutiny reads the S.M.A.R.T. health data from every drive in my server and warns me before one fails. Here’s how to set…
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My home lab dashboard: Homarr and Glances
How I use Homarr as a start page for every self-hosted service and Glances to keep an eye on CPU, memory, disks…
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Watchtower: automatic Docker updates, done safely
Watchtower updates my containers every night and reports to Discord. The important part is choosing what it should never update automatically.
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UrBackup: backing up every computer in the house
How I use the open-source UrBackup server to back up my Windows PC and a Raspberry Pi automatically over the network.
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Replacing Pi-hole with Technitium DNS, on two servers
Why I swapped Pi-hole for Technitium DNS Server as my ad and malware sink, and how I run it on two machines…
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Nextcloud: my own Dropbox and Google Drive
My Nextcloud setup with MariaDB, Redis and a cron container, with the data on a big external drive, plus the settings that…
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Nginx Proxy Manager and Let’s Encrypt: HTTPS for every self-hosted app
How a reverse proxy lets one home IP serve many apps, each with a free auto-renewing HTTPS certificate, and how I use…
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Vaultwarden: self-hosting my password manager
How I run Vaultwarden, a lightweight Bitwarden-compatible server, to keep my passwords on my own hardware, and how to set it up…
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How Immich replaced Google Photos for my family
Why I moved our 25,000+ photos off Google Photos onto a self-hosted Immich server, and a quick guide to setting it up…
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Getting started with Docker and Portainer
Docker is the foundation of my home server and Portainer is the dashboard on top. What they are, why they matter, and…