Sadly not really. I use the free tier Oracle, which honestly has worked very well, but I’m not going to recommend using Oracle aside to say that it functionally works for me.

If I were to switch I would probably go to racknerd.

VPS+VPN (WireGuard for me), with Tailscale as an emergency alternative, has worked very well for me. Knock on wood the only outages have been my own fault.

I used Photoprism years ago, so my knowledge is probably pretty outdated.

My experience of Photoprism was that mobile was not tightly integrated. At the time I used Syncthing to sync photos — it worked ok for me, but I wasn’t going to set it up on my partner’s phone, for example.

Immich Just Works on both mobile and desktop. Multi user is great, sharing is great, and the local ML and face detection work remarkably well.

Whatever works for you is the best of course! Immich fits the bill for me, and it was very much worth it for me to “buy” it.

Regarding DNS servers, what router do you have? Some routers have simple enough DNS capabilities — I have a MikroTik, and have it set up with DNS entries for internal services (including wildcard). Publicly accessible services just use my registrar’s DNS (namecheap — no complaints).

the audio had glitched so I missed the voice over

This was not a triumph.

On low end CPUs you can max out the CPU before maxing out network—if you want to get fancy, you can use rsync over an unencrypted remote shell like rsh, but I would only do this if the computers were directly connected to each other by one Ethernet cable.

If you’re running it via docker compose it’s trivial to upgrade, and there are no breaking changes. Pull, down, up, you’re done.

Frigate is pretty good, too. I’ve only been running it for a few months but I’m very happy with it.

Though, technically that leaves you more at risk of ransomeware or something that overwrites your data.

I rsync as well, but use snapshotting on the remote drives. So, a bad rsync would suck but shouldn’t really result in data loss. Ransomware on my local+remote server would of course be very bad…

I do something similar — I have a raspberry pi and a HD, with daily rsync and snapshots (monthly retained indefinitely, weekly retained for a month, daily retained for a week). It’s at family’s house, connected to my home via WireGuard via a VPS. Tailscale (or anything really) would also work here.

It’s a great setup! Just have some watchdog reboot if it can’t talk to home (a simple cronjob with ping -c1 home.lan || reboot or similar).

Even our “slow” 35Mbps upload speed is way more than enough for incremental rsyncs of my Immich library. The initial sync was done in person, though.

I got one from goHardDrive on eBay (link). It was cheap enough, looks flawless, and knock on wood has been working fine.

Googling around, the brand gets…mixed reviews. My use case is such that of this drive fails it’s not a big deal.

I’ve honestly never understood people who feel the need to “replace” Spotify. … Spotify has never made sense for my use-case.

I don’t know how to say this, but…you have extremely uncommon use-cases:

…during those times, my phone is either fully turned off (so I’ll use an MP3 player), or it’s in Airplane Mode.

Many people listen to music on stereos and don’t necessarily want a device plugged in, so

I just download the music I like to my device and listen to it via VLC.

either doesn’t work or is substantially less convenient than e.g. casting from a phone.

Not hating on your setup at all, but it’s very niche, in my experience.

My recollection is that the DVD included that library, but it’s been a while…

That’s basically the best possible outcome.

Toddlers are the reason why, despite being able to afford nice furniture for the first time in our life, we’re sticking with ratty couches and old Ikea coffee tables.

I hope I’m wrong! I’d definitely consider buying some — hopefully you can report back with results. If they’re slower than advertised but have the actual capacity that’d still be awesome!

This looks like it might be it:

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ssds/buyer-beware-fake-samsung-1080-pro-4tb-ssd-promising-unbelievable-158-gbs-speeds-for-dollar43-is-too-good-to-be-true

The drive doesn’t provide 4TB of storage either, considering the single NAND chip. That means if you were to attempt to write that much data to the SSD, at some point it would either fail or start overwriting existing data.

Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it.

— Richard P. Feynman

I think the same is true for a lot of folks and self hosting. Sure, having data in our own hands is great, and yes avoiding vendor lock-in is nice. But at the end of the day, it’s nice to have computers seem “fun” again.

At least, that’s my perspective.

I switched from raspberry pi and orange pi to a cheap Intel NUC, and I think it’s just a much nicer experience.

The pi is great fun, but the HW transcoding on a NUC “just works,” and the SSD and 16GB RAM opens a lot of doors. My N100 NUC was less than $150, and it included everything (case, power supply, 500GB SSD).

My pi found new life as an off-site backup: attach a big HDD, set up WireGuard, and have a cronjob do daily rsync and snapshots. I have it set up at in-laws, and it works great.

Ah, good point!

Dell XPS 13 Snapdragon seems like it’s trying to compete with the Air.