Look into an office supply / overstock / reseller store around you. When businesses close up shop, they usually sell their desks, chairs, etc. to some kind of overstock store. You can usually go there and get very nice chairs for less then 1/4 of the normal cost

This is great advice. I think the smaller NAS is a prudent investment now, and the more capable server can come later. I think I don’t want to let perfect be the enemy of good and keep me from investing in a local storage solution.

I think this is great advice. You’ve made me realize that I’m entering a stage of my training that is notorious for lack of free time, so maybe I’ll leave the self build tinkering for another day. It is more important for me to get the local storage going sooner than later but I will plan on building a tinkering PC someday.

I’d like to ask a clarifying question.

I’m interested in building a computer to self host from that would exclusively run on my local network. I would like to have some storage (on the order of 2x 16TB HDDs in RAID1 or 3x in RAID5) but also have the ability to host some other services, like Nextcloud, Arr stack, RSS feed, Immich for photos, and a Joplin server. I would probably put Wireguard on there to access these services remotely (but not the *arr stack).

Someday I might want to host some services that are accessible from the internet (not Wireguard), but I think that is for another time in my life.

I am gathering from your comments that, for more than strictly local storage, it is probably worth building a server with storage, rather than trying to stretch a Synology NAS to do all of this for me. Does that sound right?

I’ve been toying with this idea for a while and am not sure if I sound just go with a Synology or self build. But I think I have more interest in tinkering with the system than a Synology would allow. I’m not totally new to self hosting, I have a VPS that serves a few apps and my blog online, and use an RPi at home to serve a few things. I suppose a third option is to buy the NAS, but then build a computer to host the other applications using the NAS data.

Why not just use https://yams.media/

I use Zotero, which is open source, and sync it between my devices using syncthing. I know this may not be considered self-hosted by some, but it does put you in charge of your data.

If you only want the drive part of google–meaning just files–then seafile was way faster for me than nextcloud.

I want to like florisboard but it is lacking so much. For example, of I want to use gesture typing, I can’t have it capitalize the word “I”. I have tried switching to the beta multiple times, but never last more than a few hours because of small things like that.

I’m looking forward to Read You incorporating FreshRSS api. For now I’ll happily use FeedMe

Photoprism is really quite nice for a containerized solution.

For mostly photos I’m a big fan of Digicam

On my VPS, every night I shut down the docker containers, then backup everything (including postgres & mariadbs) with borg using borgmatic, upload to backblaze b2, then restart the containers.

Don’t wait for a sale on this game, the developers have specifically said it won’t ever go on sale