My Home Server โ€“ 2 Months On

I recently wrote about how I nearly lost all my data, then later I wrote about how I recovered from that by building a new server. The new server has now been in place for a couple of months, so I thought I would give you guys an update.

Not Plain Sailing

I knew that building the new server would be difficult; things were likely to change and it was all going to be a case of trial and error.

If you look at the building my home server post, you will see that I decided to go with Syncthing for file sync, Plex for media, UbuntuMATE as the OS and Cloudberry for the cloud backups.

After a week or so of use, I noticed that I was having stability issues where my server would completely lock up and stop responding. After some investigation, it was clear that the issue was Cloudberry. I removed Cloudberry and replaced it with Duplicati โ€“ no crashes since.

Donโ€™t waste your money on a Cloudberry license. Install Duplicati instead and donate the license fee to them.

Other changes

Once the system was stable (or so I thought) I happily went about my business assuming all was well in the world. That was until I booted up my laptop one day to find that Syncthing had deleted the entire contents of my Documents folder.

I assumed it was something I had done by accident. At the time I was moving a lot of data around, as I was working through the restoration of various backups. Maybe I had deleted the wrong folder and it had synced? Luckily I had file versioning turned on, so restoring the data was just a couple of clicks.

Weirdly, when I restored the the data, it did so to the root of my home folder, not /Documents. Again, a minor frustration that I could easily work around.

Fast-forward another few days and the same thing happened again, but this time it was my Photos folder. Then again a few days later to my Documents folder again.

I had no idea what was happening here and there was no details as to what was happening in the Syncthing logs. Enough was enough, I couldnโ€™t trust Syncthing so I decided to move to something else.

Nextcloud

I had used Nextcloud in the past, but had a number of issues with it, so I went into this with a healthy amount of trepidation.

First time around I installed Nextcloud from the snap package. This was trivial to setup, but the sandboxing was causing issues when it came to backing up. So I ended up installing Nextcloud manually (guide coming soon).

Iโ€™m happy to report that since I last used Nextcloud, the syncing functionality has improved a lot. I havenโ€™t had any issues with file syncing at all. However, thatโ€™s all Iโ€™m using it for, so I canโ€™t comment on how the other Nextcloud apps perform.

I installed the Nextcloud app on my iPhone and all my photos are backing up perfectly. I just need to remember to open the Nextcloud app once in a while, as it doesnโ€™t seem to check for new files in the background. Thatโ€™s not a big deal though.

The Result

Iโ€™ve since bought a cheap Dell monitor from Amazon, just so I didnโ€™t have to keep the old TV connected. Iโ€™ve also been successfully backing up my data to both a local USB and Backblaze B2 every night.

Duplicati is configured to send me backup reports via email (guide coming soon on that too), so I know if anything has failed. Iโ€™ve also done test restores from both USB and Backblaze; both of which were successful.

You may have noticed that I havenโ€™t mentioned Plex during this entire post. Thatโ€™s because it has been faultless; you just set it and forget it. Yes, itโ€™s proprietary software, but it works really well.

Iโ€™ve now been running Plex, Nextcloud, Duplicati and Backblaze B2 together for around 6 weeks without issue.

My files are synced everywhere I need them. The photos I take on my phone are automatically synced to the server. I can stream movies and music with ease on all my devices and everything is backed up to multiple locations.

The Cost

Building my new server has been a lot of work, but it really has been worth it. I now have a server that should last me for years to come and as a bonus, it has cost me a fraction of what my Synology did.

The final costs in both time and money look something like this:

If youโ€™re thinking about running your own server at home, Iโ€™d strongly recommend it. However, be prepared for lots of research and troubleshooting in the initial build stages.

Are you running your own server at home? Iโ€™d love to hear about your setup in the comments below.

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