Upcycled, Overengineered, and Held Together by Prayer
It started with an old college laptop. Ubuntu went on it, and suddenly I had a server. The NAS idea followed shortly after, as it always does.
I had a 4TB portable drive but didn’t want it permanently attached. Then one afternoon I walked past some discarded junk and spotted an old CCTV DVR. Cracked it open, found a healthy 1TB HDD inside. Formatted it, set up LUKS encryption, and called it my primary storage. Free of charge.
With storage sorted, I set up Immich, paired with Tailscale and Cloudflare Tunnels, gated behind Google OAuth. Google Photos, evicted. Migrated ~320GB going back to 2015: old phones, Snapchat memories (had to), scanned family prints, and VHS tapes I recorded using OBS Studio.
My parents’ wedding. My grandparents visiting family in the US, from an era when home video was a rare luxury. Black-and-white pictures of ancestors I never met. Things that don’t exist twice.
The 4TB drive handled off-server backups via Syncthing. Last week, it died. Syncthing had already done its job, everything safe. Now I’m shopping for an NVMe in this economy. Prayers welcome.
Next: once backup is properly sorted (3-2-1 rule), I’m onboarding family so they can contribute their own photos and media. A shared family archive, self-hosted, no middleman.
Open source did the heavy lifting. The dumpster did the rest.
Oh, and the server does a lot more than store memories, but that’s a story for another day.
Tools that made this possible at near-zero cost: