HP elitedesk or some other desktop can be had for cheap on eBay second hand. They will make decent servers. Install Ubuntu server or some other Linux flavour. Use docker compose to deploy services. Use tailscale to connect to these as others have suggested. Their docs on how to setup tail scale only ssh are really good. If you feel note adventurous you can get a domain and expose services via subdomains using cloudflare tunnels.

But for your use in suggest tailscale for now. Add some storage into the machine and you are good to go. You can use restic backup to safely backup to a remote location like backblaze b2, another storage on your network, or any other number of options.

That’s pretty much it, sounds so simple right? /s It will require some reading but there are usually ready made docker compose files for most projects as well as examples for restic. There are always multiple ways to do this but that’s close to what i do and it’s worked so far ™

And just ask on this community if you get stuck.

What are they competing in?

Tried it but couldn’t get the Linux client to connect to it no matter what I tried. I went back to NextCloud. But as I only ever used the file sync I ultimately switched to Seafile

I don’t do a full system backup, just data I need. I use restic to backup to B2 storage. As for docker data and databases I have a script that brings down the containers, runs a sqldump (or db type equivalent) into a tar.bz file and that gets backed up before bringing the containers back up. I used to run a Borg backup to a local drive and then rclone that to B2 so I have live data, local data, and remote. But these days I just back up remote and suck up the egress costs if needed.

You might have luck at 720 pier

I did give it a go but had trouble getting it work properly. I deployed via docker compose. The Nextcloud or owncloud clients didn’t seem to work with it unfortunately.

Good point. I will make that move

That was one reason I procrastinated so long about moving. But I figured I’d take the plunge and see how I get on

None of the activity looks hugely out of place for opening a pdf. My advice would be to take a known safe pdf, upload that to virustotal and compare the activity results and see how different they are if at all.

There might be differences based on pdf content so best to try and find a similar pdf (images, urls, etc)

I prefer navidrome https://www.navidrome.org/ over Jellyfin for music as I find it much more responsive and it has extra features like smart playlists. Just adding an extra opinion for those interested.

Thanks for posting the update on what you used

Came here to say this. Now I just need to upvote.

For me i keep a local one so if I lose a file or something gets corrupted I can restore locally without any egress costs or network lag. The sync to remote is in case of local data loss for example fire or theft.

Rclone will (should) be faster than doing a restic sync due to not having to do any deduping etc.

B2 is Backblaze’a version of S3. It’s a cloud storage solution. https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/pricing

Restic will encrypt the backup https://restic.readthedocs.io/en/latest/070_encryption.html

And it will backup directly to B2 so not intermediate storage is needed.

https://beets.io/ could do all of that for you.

Second restic or Borg with a rclone sync to storage. Restic will handle both for you though. Borg is an option if you want a local back up that then gets synced (or use restic to do multiple backups)

I use B2 storage and it’s dirt cheap compared to other offerings. You can use rclone to mount the bucket locally and only recover what you need to save on egress costs.

The advantage of restic/borg is not only encryption but snapshots, deduplication, and compression over a simple rsync.

Rsync.net can run a Borg server if you want to back up to that but B2 is much more cost effective.

I use Linkding https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding which is a clone of pinboard. Not sure if it will work with Samsung browser but I use custom actions on iOS to add links and the web UI to access links

I use https://wekan.github.io/ for tracking items to repair.

Linkding which is like pinboard but self hosted. Just because it’s simple. I could do with just using browser sync but hey, I’ve got a server running so I might as well host it

Ah yes. Good point. I haven’t used it myself yet as I’ve not had reason too. Just on my list of Tailscale things to try out