Did you find any resources or tutorials that were particularly helpful? Anything you’d recommend?

16GB RAM may be a bit low for the setup, as others have suggested, but I’m currently running Immich and Nextcloud and a handful of other small services (like FMD) dockerized in an 8GB Raspberry Pi 5. I’ve experienced very few issues. In my opinion, you could find a used Ryzen 3600 or even older, and 16GB will probably serve you just fine. You could save yourself a hundred bucks or more.

That said, what you’ve got here is nice and future-proof for quite a while, even if you end up going down the rabbit hole. You might eventually need another 16GB of RAM, but maybe not until after the AI bubble pops 🙂

He ate the lettuce!

This! I’ve been loving flipping through DVDs and blurays at Goodwill looking for gems to put in Jellyfin. I love that they will never go away, and I still feel a little giddy when I can watch something from the NAS in my office when I’m at someone else’s house. Today, my daughter and my niece each watched different episodes of Octonauts at the same time on different devices, and both were a thousand miles from my server. ☺️ All from a raspberry pi!

If you’re looking to learn how to set up a server and start selfhosting, Immich is great. You can get a docker image that includes the postgres database and everything, and it’s not hard to pair it with a reverse proxy or tailscale/VPN if you want to expose it to the web. You also don’t have to do that, just open the local port and use it on home WiFi.

HOWEVER, if you’re daunted by self-hosting and just want a simple, secure experience, Ente is the way to go, IMHO. It’s end-to-end encrypted so your photos are private, and the server is maintained and managed by people who know what they’re doing. Headache-free for you. The cost is a bit more than Google Photos, so it’s competitively priced but you’re paying only with cash instead of personal data.

I’ve been distro-hopping on a 2018 cheapo Chromebook for about a year. So far, I’ve tried Debian (Bookworm) with XFCE, AntiX, PeppermintOS, and now ARCH with Sway. None of the first three were particularly snappy, but they were all running full desktop environments. With Arch/Sway, I’m running about as light as I can get: no login manager, only 441 packages installed. Web browser is Helium. It’s early yet, but I think it does feel a little faster–most of the time. Helium still takes a few seconds to load, for example.

Running bare Arch is a bit extreme, but I think the real difference probably comes down to using a WM instead of a full DE. Sway is pretty light, and from what I could find, Wayland is supposed to be a little lighter/quicker than X11, but if toy want to go that way, you could use i3. Configuration from scratch can be a bit intimidating, but I looked online for shared dotfiles I liked and customized from there.

Good luck! Hope it goes all and is a fun experiment!

My specs: Astronaut (rev 3) Chromebook. Intel Celeron N3350 dual core @ 2.4 GHz with Intel HD Graphics 500 integrated graphics, 4 GB RAM, 32 GB eMMC storage.

Congrats on your successful install! It feels good to take control of your media, doesn’t it? I found it a great project for growing my confidence in deploying my own services. Happy hosting!

Agreed. An old machine with extra drives is both way cheaper and more flexible. A little more work, but nothing you can’t figure out with web searches and forum help.

3 x 3TB drives in RAID 5 will get you (almost) 6TB with only 9 TB total capacity, and its more fault tolerant than RAID 1. Also, its cheaper to replace a single 3TB drive than a single 6TB drive, so it’ll spread your costs out more.

I have 4 x 3TB drives on RAID 5, and I got three of them used for cheap at a local computer place. They’ll have lower life expectancy, but unless more than one dies at a time, it’ll be cheaper to replace them as they do. I got 1 drive new, and plan to replace 1 drive every year or two with new.

Unless you need speed, definitely consider HDDs, especially NAS grade. They’re slower read/write, but your use case shouldn’t need a lot of have read/write. HDDs–even the premium ones–are way cheaper than SSDs right now with the shortage, and have great longevity.