Among my must-have selfhosting items, in no particular order, I can recommend:

• Portainer, to keep track of what's going on.
• Nginx Proxy Manager, to ensure https with valid certificate to those services I want to have available from the outside.
• Pihole, of course.
• Gitea, to store my coding stuff.
• Paperless-ngx, to store every paper in my life.
• Immich, an amazingly good replacement for Google Photos.

Theres so many. Check out the awesome list: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted

I think your stategy should be one service at a time. Do everything in docker, and start by tackling a simpler service. For example, you should try paperless-ngx. Absolute game changer. I didnt realize how much managing ny own directory structure sucked until I used this. Then, grow your service list more and more!

I would avoid self-hosting backups at the same location where your devices are currently kept. There is a reason off-site backups are a thing. So many failure causes are shared with devices in the same home, from electrical issues (lightning and technical defects among other things) over water and fire damage to theft.

I want apps that let me access my data from anywhere

This may sound exaggerated, but paperless-ngx combined with a good network scanner will change your life. All paper mail accessible anywhere and also searchable. Plus, it is much easier to just scan something and drop it in an archive box instead of trying to figure out which folder (banking or taxes or maybe bills?) to file it in AND still remember that decision years later when you need to find it.

Syncthing for back ups. Lovely and easy to use.

For the downloading media part:

The *arr stack is what you're looking for + Jellyfin for streaming (Opensource, 100% free, and much better than Plex).

Prowlarr: manage your indexers

Radarr: find/automatically download movies

Sonarr: find/automatically download tv shows

Jellyfin: streaming your media

Look up trashguides for setting up all this stuff, very detailed guides. They are compatible with torrents and Usenet. I like using docker with portainer for easy management and if you use a VPN container you can selectively route these containers through the VPN so your other services that dont require the VPN dont need to route through it.

Also, privacy-wise, what do you guys use to keep your home server anonymous/hidden and protected? Is VPN enough? If yes, what VPN do you recommend?

I saw this cool thing where you could use a Raspberry Pi to access your NAS bios from your PC.

That's PiKVM

I have only a few services. I could probably downscale my server.

• AdGuard DNS

• Tailscale and Zerotier

• Open Media Vault

• Jellyfin

• Uptime Kuma

• Graphana / Prometheus

• Torrent/seed box

All on Proxmox and mirrored ZFS 2 x 20TB

For backups I use FolderSync and the default backup for windows. Super lazy, but I don't want to be the IT support of the family.

My recommendation: host OpenVPN, change the default port and only access your NAS from the internet using your VPN. Also only allow the VPN port on your router firewall.

I just discovered this and it's awesome, if you're into gaming at all. It's a containerized console emulator suite, and I think it is very well done. https://github.com/linuxserver/docker-emulatorjs

Tailscale will give you encrypted access to all devices everywhere, including iOS. For any hardware that can't run Tailscale, you can use any Tailscale client on the same network to be a subnet router - other Tailscale clients can then access that network via that client. I do this with a Raspberry Pi.

Once you have a mesh network like Tailscale setup, you can use native tools to copy files, etc, because the the mesh network provides the connection.

Checkout Syncthing and Resilio Sync. Both are great sync tools with different features. I use both, but rely primarily on Syncthing since it's much better on memory use on Android. I use Resilio just for its on-demand sync feature.

Syncthing can also run on an Rpi. I'm pretty sure Resilio can too.

You should host the internet.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

9 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 4 acronyms.

[Thread #351 for this sub, first seen 14th Dec 2023, 10:45] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

Adguard Home or pihole is a must. Jellyfin is also pretty cool.

My personal lists:

Adguard Home Channels WireGuard for remote access (this is the only open firewall port) Firefly-iii (for personal accounting) Nextcloud for files,calendar,and contacts

For accessing files from your smartphones, I know there’s Nextcloud; what other foss file management tools are available, especially on the phones?