The brief
Own photo storage and Mac backups instead of paying for iCloud/Google Photos at scale, on hardware already sitting around — an old i7 desktop repurposed into a always-on home server.
What it runs
- Immich for photo/video storage, with Time Machine backups over Samba for the Macs on the network
- Storage unified across 7 HDDs with mergerfs, with SnapRAID parity on a dedicated disk so a single drive failure doesn't cost the pool
- Borg Backup nightly, deduplicated and compressed — local, plus offsite to Backblaze B2 via rclone, the 3-2-1 rule applied literally
- Tailscale for remote access over WireGuard, Cloudflare Tunnel for the parts that need to be public — no ports opened on the router either way
- A media stack (Jellyfin, the *arr suite) behind its own VPN container, plus Uptime Kuma, smartd disk-health checks, and a Telegram bot for alerts and remote commands
Status
Actively maintained, not a one-off setup-and-forget box: disaster-recovery restores are tested, not assumed, and the stack keeps picking up new services (a UPS integration is next, waiting on a cable). Documented well enough that a full rebuild from a bare Ubuntu install is a runbook, not a guess.