So paperless works as a service that ties into your storage. I point mine at an NFS share on my Synology and just backup that share. The documents are all stored as PDFs still so worst case I still have “dumb” copies without all the tagging available if my paperless instance goes offline for some reason.
I use Backblaze B2 through my Synology NAS to offsite my important data. Most things though I just backup locally and accept the risk of needing to rebuild certain things (like most of my movie/TV media files since I can just re-rip my physical media, and the storage costs are not worth the couple of days of time in that unlikely case).
I really think this is key when thinking about your backup strategy that is specific to self hosting compared to enterprise operations. The costs come out of our pockets with no revenue to back it up. Managing backups for self hosting IMO is just as much about understanding your risk appetite and then choosing a strategy to match that. For example I keep just single copy in B2, since the failure mode I’m looking to protect against is catastrophic failure of my NAS which holds my main backups and media. I then use Proton Drive and OneDrive to backup secrets for my 2FA setups and encryption for my B2 bucket. This isn’t how I would do it at work (we have a fair more robust, but much more expensive setup). But my costs for B2 are around $15/mo which I am fine with. When I tried keeping multiple copies it had grown to over $50/mo before I cared enough to really rethink things (the cost of the hobby I told myself).
I misunderstood what you were saying, I wasn’t sure if protect required a UniFi hardware console or could be self hosted like the network application can be. It looks like it does require at least a Cloudkey gen 2 (or the plus which is what they currently sell) or one of their integrated consoles like a UDM.
It’s supported natively in the UI to configure: https://help.ui.com/hc/en-us/articles/26301104828439-Third-Party-Cameras-in-UniFi-Protect
It was added in EA in mid September and should be GA now as far as I know.
I use UniFi Protect and record to my UDM, though you should be able to install it all on your own hardware if you’d prefer. Their cameras are pretty decent but a bit pricy in a lot of cases. Though they do support 3rd party cameras now.
I’ve also heard a lot of good things about frigate, but I’ve not really looked into it since I already have UniFi gear.
You don’t need Linux for Plex or Jellyfin, both have prebuilt server installers for windows. If you want a general guide, Jeff Geerling has a video from a couple years ago about setting up Jellyfin on I think his NAS. But honestly I would just go read the docs for the project you choose and follow their install guide. You’ll need to ensure your media is organized on your drive, but you should do that anyways. Other than that you’ll need a PC that’s essentially always on (or at least is on when you want to watch videos), and a client at your TV like an Apple TV, Android stick, or FireTV. I have run both, and Plex is probably the easier, just works, solution, but it is closed source and needs a subscription for some features (though you can use it just fine without one). There are some hiccups I ran into primarily around streaming to an Apple TV, but honestly it was super stable for me. I switched to Jellyfin recently and the setup was a tad harder and the UI is IMO significantly worse than plex, but it’s open source and fully free. I may switch back to Plex here soon just because their AppleTV Live TV (from my antenna) is just much better supported than Jellyfin.
The services often associated with these media servers that are designed for searching and grabbing content are the *arr stack (radarr, sonarr, etc). You will often see them talked about in the save places but you don’t need them to run Jellyfin or plex.
Another plus one for Proton with your own domain.
Self hosting sounds good, but it’s fraught with mines that if you don’t know what you’re doing can take from “can’t send email because my domains been back listed” to “everything in my network is now sending spam to the entire world”. Sure, many folks self hosting sounds with no issues, but the price for configuring something wrong can be steep and IMO is just not worth the trouble and risks when there are good options for encrypted, privacy protecting email services for a reasonable price.
Agree 100%. Most of the former Plex users turned Jellyfin users I have come across did so better Plex was broken in some way for them. For me it was the general lack of care in creating/maintaining a good Apple TV app. Over the past few years it’s just gotten buggier and buggier with a lot of complaints on the Plex forums where devs would essentially stop by to say they weren’t working on any fixes.
Jellyfin doesn’t fix 100% of the issues, but at least there is active development on Swiftfin that showed a desire to fully support all devices.