I hate having to run my own backups. That's been a massively hidden cost behind self hosting that I did not originally account for. Anything sufficiently robust is expensive and anything cheap is unreliable (at least at the scales of data I have, 4k+ RAW videos and photos are massive).
this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2025
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Content management makes up very little of what I self host.
That stuff's just curated and is always been curated as I take new things that I need I curate them.
Then there's another class of data I deal with which is synchronization. Synchronization as the wheat and the chaff in it and if any of it goes away I don't really care because anything that was really worth keeping already got curated.
do any of you hate how self-hosting services like photo- or document-management systems, or even a simple rss tool, forces you to sort your stuff out, and put your decades old files in order?!
What is this "sort" thing you speak of? I don't sort anything, I have NextCloud syncing my entire photos, videos and documents folders and they are just as messy as ever. Granted, I do go through my photos and videos once a year and dump them in a folder named for the year they were taken. Occasionally, I'll go hog wild and try to sort some of a year's photos/videos into folders named after events. Though, that hasn't happened in a number of years. I setup NextCloud so I could have everything synced to my own server and just forget, not have to deal with labeling my data.
As for bookmarks. I already keep those in folders; but, I don't sync those. I use my desktop far more than I use my phone for web browsing. And the types of things I use my phone for (mostly recipes), I just keep bookmarked there.
It looks like we found another person that's immune! Sample their blood
Just 2k in bookmarks? Pffft! Those are rookie numbers. Check back when you have 59k bookmarks. Currently there are 1.1k in the broken links category. The vast majority of the links are topics I research or have interest in, exterior of self-hosting. I do not consume TV data, but I do a ton of reading. I find that reading gives me better retention of the topic, and it's rather easy to highlight & search for cross comparisons, and further research. Ever since I was a wee lad, barely able to read, I have had an insatiable lust for knowing. It is this that drives the link counts. LOL
This is so foreign to me. I never bookmark anything ever. I leave a few tabs open until I complete that task, read that article or decide I don't care anymore.
I digitally collect odd things, selfhosted in several apps depending on if it's for 'read later and decide' or preserve.. For one, I like the etymology of words or phrases and how they've evolved in meaning, and in some instances bastardized the meaning. For another, I collect political cartoons from any country. I am fascinated how some of the ones I've read about, have changed some people's minds. Things I find educational. Things that are totally polar opposite me. You'd be surprised what you learn even tho you may still remain opposed. So these are a back up of a backup which gets backed up, lol, It's the source files if you will, and I archive them in another app however I still keep the source as a backstop.
I'll end with this as an example since this might be misconstrued as not about selfhosting, As a wee lad, someone donated a set of Encyclopedia Britannica to us. I read those cover to cover many times. So, with the help of self hosting and dedicated devs around the globe, thank you so very much for being so generous with your skills and time, I can continue my quest to know.
TL:DR: I'm just a weird, old man.
I'm the same! I just don't keep track of where all the useless knowledge in my head comes from.
Manual web crawler at that point
LOL Never thought of it like that, but yeah.
When I need something I'll ask you instead of google
LOL
That's the neat part...
Yes. Some services are not good at accepting existing naming conventions, insist on their own naming and sorting conventions, or require a lot of third party services that will unfortunately rename your movie to something foreign or otherwise completely wrong.
It takes quite a bit of time to clean up titles and metadata that you may be migrating or adding from a personal collection. Sure, it’s free…but it doesn’t mean it isn’t frustrating or time consuming.
I guess the trick is to not look for stuff to host because you'll end up with all kinds of things you weren't doing in the first place.
And so little time!
Have you considered the possibility that, if you have 2k bookmarks, this isn't necessarily a self-hosting issue, but rather a bookmark hoarding issue :)
That’s why I don’t go back and reorganize old bookmarks. I just start fresh every time.
This is what I do. I keep the old ones around for a while, and every time I realize that I'm not missing anything, and delete them.
Worst case, I'll have to root around in my backups. But it has never happened wrt browser bookmarks.
I know, right!? Do I have to let go? Yes! Am I defined as a person by the shit I accumulate? No!
Sometimes hitting delete is the best thing you can do. Especially bookmarks, how many of them is out of date, or not relevant to you any more. And if you needed some of it, you can find it again. Sure, there is a few things a bit harder to find, but it should take less time than sort through 2k bookmarks. 😀
I'm frustrated that Immich doesn't have a "back up new photos only" option.
All the photos on my phone are already in a huge external library with my backups from previous phones. I don't want to delete them from my phone just so immich doesn't freak out, and I don't wanna have them on my NAS twice
Immich seems great, but this seems like the bread and butter migration path that nearly everyone would take.
When I got a new phone, immich was weird about the photos that came over when I transferred my phone data. After I confirmed they were all backed up (in like 3 places) I just nuked the copies pictures and videos from my phone.
I don't want to nuke them from my phone though. I want them on my phone, and I want them on my NAS 1 time.
Actually, that is a thing I like. Going through this stuff can be tedious, but it brings a lots of memories, things that I forgot about, things I once wanted to do. And also, after cleaning my digital life I feel similar as after cleaning in the physical world - good - I did something, I made my world a tad bit more organized and a tad less overwhelming. (I should note that I am lazy and I always must force myself to clean, but I never regret doing that after I start 😀) P.S. as I wrote in one comment below, maybe bookmarks is not a necessarily a thing that you want to go through and sort. Here I am more writing about my notes, or photos, etc..
Definitely second your feeling. I am similar in my relationship to cleaning. It feels like a lot of effort, but efforts feel good afterwards.
Nothing better than a properly formatted data file.
Self hosting teaches you this
Karakeep. It will throw an error if a website is down and you won't get tags.
I think that’s a feature 😅😅
Just kidding, I had no issue with my photos for example with Photoprism, but for streaming my music with gonic I need to make some modifications for all my album art to show up, and in some cases titles and album names…
It is indeed a great feature but how time-consuming haha :)
I inherited my music collection from my 20 years old limewire addicted self, so it's a complete mess. I'm in the process of completing albums and using Picard to properly tag everything... 20 years of music collection...it'll take me 20 more years!
Anyway, I guess it's a warning for anyone starting to accumulate data: think about metadata, formats and data-management. NOW!
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There is a hidden cost to every hobby and everybody is willing to tolerate a certain degree of shittyness.
I have a friends that has a rather old car and something on it is always broken. But he has no problem having 20 different apps for appliances, instead of deploying home assistants. Or having ads everywhere and even trying pihole or at least NextDNS.
On the other hand, I see my car as a transportation tool and when I need it I want to use it without worrying about some random part exploding. But I have no problem running Proxmox and hosting tons of services for my family.
That said, I would definitely not self-host something like NextCloud or any business critical component for my business and just paid somebody for the service.
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Are you kidding me? True, there is time involved. My biggest 'sin' right now is "home gallery" for it works on MY directory structure which I won't give up.
The geoguessing game that hides in it is superb ! I'm still amazed with the images I've been able to locate. Sometimes 40 years back.
Simplify as much as you can.
And remember, if you're also self-hosting for family, someone will need to take over all that software and digital clutter when you're gone.
I've been trimming as much as I can on my NAS, including only keeping the most important self-hosted software and heavily purging old files and backups.
This. I'm not that old yet, but the realization hit me in the face pretty hard. And all the more reasons to sort it out. And definitely simplify. Or "make it usable" let's say.
You don't even have to be old. Death or serious illness/injury can affect us at any age, and it would suck if your family lost access to all the self-hosted photos and videos, for example.
"Make it usable" is a great idea.
Scaryyyy !
I just very recently discovered that bitwarden (vaultwarden) has this perfect feature like a "trusted contact" (not sure) where you can choose a person that can request access to your password vault, and if you DON'T answer in X days (configurable), they get access.
It's important to use services with a workflow that works for you; not every popular service is going to be a good fit for everyone. Find your balance between exhaustive categorization and meaningless pile of data, and make sure you're getting more out than you're putting in. If you do decide that an extensive amount of effort is worth it, make sure that the service in question is able to export your data in a data-rich format so that you won't have to do it all again if you decide to move to a different tool.
If you really access them that infrequently, are they actually worth keeping?
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Make sure you check https://karakeep.app/, because it has, at least, automatic tagging and full text search on the bookmarks
2k bookmarks? i would just automate the process of saving each of them locally and just forget it lol. if it's somehow needed later search on the older archive
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