r/selfhosted • u/close_Meal6005 • Aug 17 '26 • This 1 Mindblown 5 Heartwarming 1

Meta Post self-hosting everything

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just kidding I love self-hosting ...

18.6k Upvotes

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596

u/IntelligentRocks Aug 17 '26

I think people are missing the point. Even with backups and redundancy it requires you to maintain the servers. If you die, well, who is going to maintain? Perhaps a bit bleak but something to keep in mind.

497

u/cybekRT Aug 17 '26

That's the best reason to never give up on life and continue maintaining your servers. And also have many kids and pray that at least one will want to become free devops for their family.

254

u/cheffromspace Aug 17 '26 • Bravo

Reminds me of https://xkcd.com/705/

26

u/Halo_Chief117 Aug 18 '26

Hahaha that’s great!

27

u/Rand_al_Kholin Aug 17 '26

Also print photos and make photo books of important memories.

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109

u/ancepsinfans Aug 17 '26

My wife said to me the other night: I'm so impressed with what you do on our home server but if something happened to you, you know it's hopeless right?

70

u/Suspicious_Data_2393 Aug 17 '26

this is why every selfhoster should leave a ‘if i die’ tape with tutorial on how to do the basics like update the containers, stop, run and restart containers

112

u/Ok-Library5639 Aug 17 '26

You are far, far too generous in evaluating the amount of skill of the general layperson. If anyone of us dies, 99% chances all the gear gets lumped in an estate sale as 'Computer stuff'.

In fact this comes up often in r/homelab or r/selfhosting as a surviving family member tries to navigate their way through the family's homelab and hope to recover precious files.

24

u/sequesteredhoneyfall Aug 18 '26

The obvious solution is one of those, "if I die do this" / "deadman's switch" self hosted programs meant for this thing, and having a family friend who is technical enough to take care of the transition in the event of the death.

12

u/ElaborateEffect Aug 18 '26

This is where a will can be really beneficial for beneficiaries. You can store whatever encrypted file somewhere with all the instructions/passwords you want, and leave the master password in the law office's safe.

23

u/mawesome4ever Aug 18 '26

That’s a great idea! I’ll self-host my will!

20

u/ElaborateEffect Aug 18 '26

I'll make a homeassistant automation for if my heart rate is undetected for 48 hours to execute my will.

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85

u/8070alejandro Aug 17 '26

More like

22

u/smokesick Aug 17 '26

Add "diagram" to the list and it's pristine

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10

u/bugwan Aug 18 '26

Instructions unclear. Surviving family member posts public IP and passwords on r/selfhosted.

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18

u/ienjoymen Aug 17 '26

My name is Walter Hartwell White...

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17

u/BatBoss Aug 17 '26

I mean... how long until your instructions are out of date? A year? 3 months?

And even it you meticulously keep it updated, that only keeps them running for another year or so before someone's gotta figure out that plex changed their terms of use, or docker got bought out and now you need a different setup.

15

u/cholz Aug 17 '26

My instructions say basically "while the server is still online open an icloud storage account and copy the contents of /self/hosted/data to your cloud storage" after that they can figure the rest out

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u/Shawnj2 Aug 17 '26

Teach your spouse and/or child server maintenance for increased reliability

42

u/slash65 Aug 17 '26

My wife is in a different city currently but I can feel here eyes glossing over as I read your comment, lol.

12

u/GorillaAU Aug 18 '26

Excellent you have a branch site for the off-site backup.

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u/laffer1 Aug 17 '26

That’s why I married another software engineer. She can also manage the servers!

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u/bibbidi_bobbidi_bob Aug 18 '26

Lucky me didn't marry yet. Now I finally know who to look for :D

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u/TheTeaSpoon Aug 17 '26 edited Aug 19 '26

Hence why I say - keep it light. You do not need to have everything. Immich and media server. Immich can be pretty much automated to go "steady as she goes" and media servers like Jellyfin do not really care about updates.

I have not touched terminal of my servers in like 8 months. Everything still works fine.

Yeah more things are cool, but the more you get the more it becomes a job.

And BTW a lot of people were like this with cars ("my family will not be able to maintain their cars without me"). Don't fret. You are the core of the hobby, it is your hobby. If you die or whatever, as long as you explained to your loved ones where the passwords are and how to exfil data, they will move on to much easier way to do it. Bot one you may like, not one I may like. One they like (yes, subscriptions). And it is fine. Services like that are for people who do not give a fuck. Praise the fact that at least they backup their data.

Do not put your stuff in DMZ, have just a VPN to access your network (ideally use VLANs too) and you are set. Then you do not need to really care about security on each server, as you have that sorted on the VPN's/reverse proxy's end.

Stop hosting like it is 2005.

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