The server had some issue last night, and this morning I see that it’s a problem with the zfs pool. Probably one of the hard drives has failed. I’m probably best turning the computer off.
I don’t really want to buy another hard drive to fix it, in fact I don’t really want to look after a server.
Well I bought another hard drive, but it won’t arrive until Tuesday. Seems good hard drives have long lead times even on Amazon. I’m trying to mount the pool as read only and copy off some things that I want. Most of the stuff on there could be lost and not cause issues. I have photos backed up elsewhere. Might be a few docs that haven’t been sync’d somewhere else though. It’s just going super slow, haven’t even managed to export the pool yet.
Whilst this is going on, I have been thinking about not having a server. Well not having one store stuff or have services that I don’t mind about losing (like Silverbullet or the minecraft server [that no-one plays on]). I came across this, Nextcloud hosting by Hetzner. ~$5/month for 1 TB of Nextcloud. Can even use your own domain. Nextcloud has loads of features too, and apps for every OS. Before I considered iCloud but iCloud not on a mac is horrible. All my photos are 600GB, so I could keep them all on there, as a backup. Probably many of those 600GB are junk photos I don’t need and could be culled. That is going to take forever so unlikely to happen. Nextcloud can also do client side encryption on devices, if you’re worried about things. You can’t see those files on the web of course, but you can set it per folder.
Other things I use the server for are applications. Self-hosted stuff, but do I really need them? (also I’ve thought having a mini-pc on all the time with some apps could be useful). Most of them don’t really matter. Probably AdGuard, Actual Budget (as I’ve been using that) and Plex are the main ones. I’ve since switched to NextDNS, so the interest keeps working even whilst the server doesn’t, and I quite like it, so I might just stick with it. Seems to do what I need. Once I get my data off, I should move ActualBudget to my private apps VPS. Plex (and I have tried JellyFin but I have lifetime plexpass so seems a waste not to use it) is good for stuff I’ve collected over the years, plus a few favourites saved. Admittedly much of it is never watched and could probably go.
I’m talking myself into returning to the server I had about 1-2 years ago, which was a small box with two SSDs in it.
It’s difficult, as pros and cons to it all. Whilst I had the server, I might as well use it, but if the hard drives are going to fail, do I want to buy replacements? They’re all 9 years old, and if one has gone then is it soon until the others? I’ve bought one with the hopes of fixing and then giving myself time to decide. I’ll probably keep it in my main computer as a backup drive if I retire the server.
I used to love selfhosting stuff, but these days I have no interest. As I get older, I want more time, not more chores, and so I’d rather go without or perhaps pay a small amount for something. I used to host Nextcloud, but found it overkill for what I wanted and didn’t like the potential maintenance of it, but if someone else is doing that… It also has a whole app store. Probably not use many of them, but things like the music app is quite nice, as it also uses the subsonic backend so other apps can access it. There’s also the photo management app, Memories. Perhaps I’ll buy a month and test it out. Or just play with the demo.
I thought about using it as an excuse to reorganise all our documents. Perhaps with the Johnny.Decimal system. Nextcloud has a notes app, so I could keep the index there too… Although the JD is maybe too much, and all I really need is to see someone else’s folder categorisation and copy that a little. Nextcloud also has tagging for files, so that adds more dimensions, although I like the idea of leaving it plain to make it useful in a simple file structure as well.