I was born in the 90s. I grew up with computers. Other generations call us “digital natives”. I am lucky and proud to work with computers every day with a database specialization. People tend to generate lots of data. It might be administrative papers (bills, contracts, paychecks), sentimental photo albums or whatever the data is as long as it is their data. At work, we pay attention to back up every data though it was the most important thing in the world. At home, it should be the same but, in fact, nobody really cares about it unless the data is definitely gone.
My family members used to buy a single USB hard drive and regularly copy their data to it and think it is safe. This highly depends on the frequency of the backup. Actually, they didn’t copy very often. If the drive fails, they call me to the rescue but I’m not a magician.
Another solution involves sending their data to “the cloud” because they have seen on TV this will solve all of their problems. Cloud providers can, intentionally or unintentionally, leak their data. If we materialize data, I’m not sure my family wants to send their physical storage cupboard to the United States for the sake of data safety. We live in Belgium and France. There is no point of sending our data to the other side of the planet in someone else’s hands.
So I decided to self-host a set of storage servers at home and offer this service to my own family. It has to be simple as my parents will be the main users. I am a full-time employee and a proud dad. I have a little bit of time to do the service maintenance. It is an opportunity for me to learn and share it to the world. Welcome to my self-hosting project. I hope you will learn something too.