this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2025
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UPDATE: To everyone who suggested YUNO, thank you so much. This seems like it is about to make my journey much easier. It is basically almost exactly what I was looking for, but I was unaware that it existed.
Thank you ALL for your suggestions, actually. It's a bit overwhelming for an almost complete noobie but I an going to look into all of the suggestions in time. I just saw that there were several mentions of YUNO so I decided to make that one of the first things I investigated.

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!

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[–] SidewaysHighways@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago (2 children)

get your password situation squared away! every time i spin something new up i am grateful to have a pw manager to keep it all unique and maximum character limit

don't even have to memorize the user of a lot of em

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[–] oeuf@slrpnk.net 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Check out YUNOhost - it's pre-configured for you and designed for beginners. Mine's been running for about three years on a VPS with no problems and I had no previous experience with self-hosting.

Definitely keep your files backed up locally though. No server is invincible.

[–] MTZ@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I will certainly look into that. I've never heard of YUNOhost but I'm going to give it a look soon!

[–] oeuf@slrpnk.net 2 points 1 week ago

Do it! It's madness that YUNOhost is not more well-known, considering what it does.

[–] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

I think the very first step to building resiliency is to sign up for Proton's cloud services. That will give you access to mail, both from Gmail via forwarding and a new inbox with a separate address. You'd also get a password manager and cloud storage. From there you can start self-hosting alternatives. Probably start with Immich as Google Photos is a big deal and it takes a ton of storage. Proton is a Swiss non-profit so the probability for enshitification is not nearly as high as with Google.

As soon as you have redundant storage, do a Google Takeout and download a full archive of your stuff. This feature may not be there for long given the current corporate climate.

[–] MTZ@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

Thanks, I will certainly look into this after I get some sort of basic understanding of the concepts at play.

[–] mushroommunk@lemmy.today 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

That econdary drive I highly recommend you find a way to move that out of your house. For me I have a friend 8 hours away, we swap drives on occasion to keep each other's backups in case of flood/fire/toddler or whatever other force of nature to save ourselves cloud backup costs

[–] MTZ@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

That's a great idea. I've had a safety deposit box for years. I can just store it in there!

[–] tburkhol@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

Safe deposit box is exactly the right size to hold a 3.5" HDD. Or several. I keep a backup Yubikey there too, because I love the physical token 2FA, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to lose it.

[–] DarkAri@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Some cloud backups offer lifetime deals which can be a good second backup.

As for self hosting. You should buy a domain, use a dynamic DNS service. This doesn't cost much but is very useful. Get a decent router that isn't superhackable. Get something like fedora for your servers, the os.tree file system is good because if you break your machine with updates you can just roll back.

Randomize your ports, be careful what you expose behind open ports, be careful what you install on your server, and run stuff in containers. Also block port scanning.

As for learning you are just going to have to research. For servers you need to open ports for whatever you are using, like a webserver, file server, etc. you need to be mindful of security. Keep it updated. You should keep your server separate from your main machines if possible and disable your main machines ability to port scan your server by using a VPN or something on your server.

It's not all that difficult. Just watch some videos and passively absorb this knowledge.

As for backups, you should invest in one of these lifetime plans from a cloud provider. Maybe create separate accounts that you only use for your server stuff to help keep the details from getting leaked. (Email accounts, passwords, etc) On top of this you should have a second backup which I recommend hosting yourself so you can learn. This way your data should be safe.

In your backup server, you should run mirror raid, this way if you lose a drive, you won't lose your data. Parity raid is t quite as good because you could lose a second drive while rebuilding. It's cheaper for the amount of space, but you can just invest in a couple of high density, enterprise level drives from a reputable brand. Run mirror raid, and backup your files. Throw in a small SSD for the OS, and a medium SSD for cache. You can go as cheap or expensive as you want.

Get some remote management software. Since you aren't super technical, use a remote desktop system. Just make sure it's a good one that is well maintained because this is a big single point of failure in your security.

If you install a web browser on your server, disable scripts and ads, and only use it to download stuff you need from GitHub or something. Try to avoid exposure to sites which may have vulnerabilities.

As for the server. Using VMs and containers, you can use it relatively safely for many things. You could even use cloudfare if you wanted for additional security so your servers actual IP is not ever in the wild. People will only see an IP for that particular port and server VM. This is a bit overkill maybe.

You can run a backup server, web servers, game servers, you can host your own DNS, you can run media servers, and even your own private VPN or local AI models. There is tons of stuff you can do with a server.

Also don't forget to set a reminder to reregister your domain name!

The simplest setup would be an old computer with a bunch of hard drives attached, maybe an old desktop, maybe a laptop with a powered USB hub. This is all you really need to get started.

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