Self Hosting

With the state of the world right now it's a good idea to keep our own backups of anything that is available online right now but might not stay available forever. Even if all you have is a folder on your phone or laptop, it's a good idea to start making backups.

My Setup

The first step was to create a NAS (Network Attached Storage) computer. I have an old tower PC that I used for this, which I used mostly because it was just collecting dust and had a lot of room to upgrade. And by upgrade I mean cram as many SATA Hard Drives into it as I could find. That project actually started before this website, and is the reason why the site used to be called tBan Archive.

I used Open Media Vault to make the storage available from any computer on my local network. The software takes care of a lot of things for you while still giving users a lot of control over how everything operates. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to build a NAS on basically any hardware. I have three hard drives set up in a RAID 5 configuration, which was easy to set up in OMV.

My Software Recommendations

Immich
Immich is a good alternative to Google Photos if you want to use a NAS. You'll need a VPN if you want to connect to it from your phone when you're not home. Wireguard is a good option for that. That applies to any services you might be running from your NAS as well, like the shared folders.

Jellyfin
If you have a cd/dvd drive on a computer you can and should be making backups of any dvds you have, since those discs are not going to last forever. And since you'll be making backups of those dvds anyway, Jellyfin will make watching movies from your digital collection way easier. Jellyfin is a piece of server software that will make it possible to stream those videos to your other devices with an interface that is super similar to other streaming platforms like hulu or netflix. There's even a Roku channel for it!