My Home Network Backup Architecture
Table of Contents
A little more than a year ago, I won a fairly old Dell Optiplex at a company raffle (I don't work there anymore). While nobody else seemed to be interested in the machine, I immediately saw the opportunity to turn this thing into my very own home server.
Of course, I let the thing collect dust for almost an entire year before I got up and actually put that plan into motion.
Given that this was my first larger networking project and I had absolutely no idea about network architecture, backups, parity et cetera, I decided to purchase Unraid because the interface looked simple enough for me and it wasn't prohibitively expensive.
Ever since then, I've become kinda enamoured with networking, self-hosting applications and just freeing myself ever more from the hands of 'cloud providers'. This has lead me to develop quite an extensive networking setup which I would like to do present in a little more detail.
Most importantly, there are some amazing docker containers I would like to showcase and tell you about how I have implemented them into my setup. But first, let's start with the basics…
1. Network share structure
Instead of considering my home server as a 'simple' backup solution, it has become my main storage for all files.
This enables me to care less and less about the clients I use and whatever data is stored on them. By design, all of my files live on my server first and then I sync them over using syncthing (if I need them when I am not connected to my home network) or access them directly from the server.
To achieve this, I have structured my files into various shares that all serve their own purpose. Let's take a look at them!
1.1. media share
1.2. appIO share
1.3. appdata share
1.4. data share
2. Self-hosted apps
I self-host all of my apps using docker. It's quite simple to get started since Unraid taps directly into dockerhub and I can compose these containers graphically through its web interface.