My self-hosting Set-Up

My first NAS was a single bay Terramaster box, bought from Amazon about 2011. My thoughts were not on security or back-ups, I simply wanted somewhere remote to store all my media.

It was hooked up to my Asus O!Player and I could connect to it remotely from the Blackberry, or whatever I had at the time. It really served my needs.

Until one day, as often happens in Santo Domingo, the electricity went on the fritz and fried it. Of course, it wasn't connected to a UPS and I possibly lost some photos. Luckily I used to keep most things on CD-Rs (or DVD-Rs) as a back-up.

Anyhow. Lesson learnt.

In 2014, I started to think a bit more seriously about my data and bought myself a DS213J Synology NAS with two 4TB WD Red hard disks (RAID array) and connected it to a UPS. It was fantastic. Of course, I didn't use it to its full extent, I am sure, but being able to back everything up automatically from my phone, my desktop, my laptop onto the Synology cloud was a big advantage. I even synced everything on my Dropbox and Google Drive back to my Synology NAS. Overkill, possibly, but I had the space to do it.

As the Asus O!Player, Raspberry Pis and other boxes became dated, I started to use Synology apps, plus Kodi on Android for all my media needs. Worked great for most of the time.

It was about 2018, I suppose, that I heard things about Docker. Unfortunately, my DS213J Synology NAS was incompatible on having Docker installed. Didn't bother me so much at the time.

One day, I updated my DS213J to DSM7, the new synology software system. I had started on DSM5, gone through DSM6 and, although it probably wasn't recommended for my particular NAS, I installed DSM7. For the best part it worked, but something broke. One of my 4TB WD Red hard disks was, so the Synology said, dying. I bought a new 4TB WD Red hard disk, which was now, considerably cheaper, but the NAS never really worked as well as it once did.

I wanted a new one. One that could run Docker (or Container Manager, as it is now called on a Synology).

For Christmas 2023, I convinced my wife to get me a DS223 (special offer on Amazon). I bought two more 4TB WD Red hard disks (no need for more storage).

Once I had it all setup, I started looking at Docker. First Containers were Home Assistant, then JellyFin, then Homebox, then ESPHome, Codeserver, MQTT. Absolutely fantastic. Docker here, Docker there, Docker every bloody where. Then Vaultwarden, then Music Assistant........then Stirling PDF.... uh-oh!

All of a sudden (about a year later), my Synology DS223 is slowing down to a snail's pace. It wasn't the storage, I was still using the DS213J, so no problem there. It was the meagre 2GB memory being used up by all the various containers. The Stirling PDF one, seemingly the worst memory hog of all.

Luckily, I remembered a friend had given me an old Intel NUC box (DC3217IYE). It worked perfectly. 40GB SSD card and 4GB memory. I wiped the previous Windows, installed Ubuntu (Server), Docker and Proxmox. I moved a couple of containers on to that and everything was working much better. I later bought a 240GB SSD and upgraded the memory to 16GB (2*8GB) which are the maximum the mini PC can handle, as far as I know. I stuck a 4TB SSD USB drive, with Ext4 format, onto one of the ports for good measure as well.

Never got on well with Proxmox. Changed to Portainer and learnt all about 'stacks'. Then I decided it was just much easier to learn Docker Compose and run everything from a command terminal.

..........and that is where I am today:

1. DS213J - 2*4TB WD Red hard disks (RAID array) used for storage and backup.
2. DS223 - 2*4TB WD Red hard disks (RAID array) used for storage, backup, some Docker containers, Reverse proxies, etc.
3. NUC DC3217IYE with 240GB SSD, 4TB USB SSD drive attached, 16GB memory and Ubuntu 24.04 with Docker installed.

So my quest for world dominance continues.