The original post: /r/selfhosted by /u/wkjagt on 2025-02-22 12:58:56.

I want to get away from iCloud, Dropbox, Flickr etc. because data keeps growing, especially with kids getting to ages where they also have data to store (especially my daughter takes tons of photos and her phone is always 99% full), free services no longer being free, and just generally feeling less and less comfortable with big companies owning my data. I decided to set up my own “cloud” with storage for the family. This is what I have (and have planned) so far. I’d love to get some feedback on what else to do or what to change.

I set up a small computer next to my router in the basement running Debian. It’s wired to the router directly, so doesn’t need wifi. I have two external hard drives connected to it (both 8 TB Seagate drives) set up as a RAID 1 array using mdadm. mdadm sends notifications over Telegram in case something happens. I still need to figure out how mdadm identifies those drives in case one goes down, and what kind of id it includes in the notification, so I can physically label the drives.

I use Nextcloud on that same Debian machine running in Docker containers and using the RAID drive for data storage. I plan to make an account for each family member. Nextcloud has a pretty nice app for iPhone and Android. So for example my daughter could upload all her photos to her Nextcloud account.

I have a Cloudflare tunnel and domain set up to access Nextcloud when not at home.

I also have the RAID drive mounted on my MacBook using NFS so I can access it directly.

I have a third identical 8 TB Seagate drive that I plan to set up with a Raspberry Pi at my in-laws, and have my Debian machine sync its RAID drive with the Raspberry Pi using rsync. I haven’t bought the RPi yet, but I’ll probably get something like a used RPi 3. I do have a RPi 1B, but I guess it’s not powerful enough (or maybe it is, I’d have to test it).

I _think_ this covers everything to have our data safe and accessible. Even in case something happens to me, my wife doesn’t need to know how to manage the setup, she can just take one of the drives from the basement (or the one at her parents) and have access to all the family photos. I’d love to get feedback though on what to improve.