So, about two months ago, I had a very eye opening experience. As the result of a single misconfigured security setting on my Android, I was locked out of my Google Account on my phone AND all of my PCs. I had no access whatsoever to Google, or any of the literally hundreds of services that I get through Google.

This is when I realized that I relied entirely on Google/Android because those two days were actually very difficult, being cut off from media, services, passwords, everything, from the past almost twenty years of my life, could be taken away from me in an instant. The decades of my life that were locked away in my Google Account included hundreds of thousands of pictures, almost a hundred thousand audio tracks, several hundred books, several hundred apps, thousands of videos, etc. ad infinitum. Unfortunately, very little of this material was backed up at that point. That is my fault. Also, the misconfigured security setting was my fault as well.

The amount of data, media, memories, services, etc. that would have been lost is actually endless and it would have affected my life in several ridiculously negative ways.

Luckily, in the end, I was able to get my access back and then basically immediately grabbed all of the several terabytes of information and media of mine that they had, and that I was almost locked out of. I have it all in my house now on a drive in my computer, with a backup made on another disconnected disk.

I then decided that no corporation was ever going to have such an insanely high level of influence on and control over my entire life and my media ever again. That experience was actually very scary.

I’ve been trying to get into SelfHosting, but am finding it quite daunting and difficult.

There is a LOT of stuff that I have to learn, and I am mostly unsure of where to even begin. I know basically nothing about networking.

I need to learn the very basic stuff and work my way up from there, but everything that I’ve seen on the Internet assumes that the reader already has a basic to intermediate understanding of networking and the subjects that surround it. I do not, but I am going to learn.

I just need someone to show me where to start.

Thanks in advance for any assistance!

  • Caveman@lemmy.worldEnglish
    21·
    8 hours ago

    I’d recommend starting by hosting a nextcloud instance.

    1. Get a desktop computer, pretty much anything will do but having room to add more HDD is important.
    2. Install Linux distro like Ubuntu or something
    3. Get a static IP so your IP doesn’t change
    4. Setup a router port forwarding rule so that an outside address points to your nextcloud instance.

    Then do some optional steps:

    • Automatically turn on PC when power comes back on (BIOS setting)
    • Startup script that runs nextcloud on startup
    • Install docker to manage services like nextcloud
    • Add some remote desktop thingy to manage your server from your laptop (ssh is also good but a steeper learning curve)
    • Get a NAS for storing data with redundancy.
    • Have some other form of backup like your current Google account, cloud provider or one of your mates with a similar setup.

    That’s pretty much what you need to start hosting your own files, then later on you can setup a email server, media server like Jellyfin, homepage and everything.

    Just go one step at a time and when you hit an issue you can and should ask Google or ChatGPT. Remember, everything exposed to the Internet is vulnerable so take security seriously. Always have everything protected by a decently long password, pairing requirement with your server confirming adding a device or an API key.