I’m a good chemist, but not IT advanced. Started using Debian out of the box last year on miniPC. Running Jellyfin only on that local machine. Don’t understand coding, but copy/ paste terminal instructions from trusted sites. Have 1TB music, films and documents. Want to move all photos from Google.
I’m somewhat of a chemist too, tho, it was back in the 60s…and in my basement…but yeah.
Small advice, document everything.
You know what, I’ve been the guy that didnt in the past. Your reminder is spot on
I would like to reiterate the importance of taking notes. As a younger man, I never felt the need thinking, ‘I can remember all that’. Wrong! So as a elderly man, taking profuse notes is paramount. So it’s a good idea to get in the practice of taking notes while you are young.
I use NotePad++ locally, then transfer the notes to an encrypted Obsidian vault on my server. I can actually stand up a server, implement all the security necessary, install 30 or so apps, and be in production within hours just from notes. They house all my Docker compose files and everything. So it’s kind of like painting by numbers.
Get in the habit of taking notes and refine them as well, as you galong.
Preferably in an easy, maintainable way. Like markdown in a git repo.
I find that digitalocean (which is a VPS provider) has great tutorials.
I often tend to search “how to X site:digitalocean.com”, despite hosting almost everything on my own hardware.
Much appreciated. Have bookmarked this now
Honestly, I don’t think it’s possible to get by just trusting any particular guide without developing at least some actual understanding of the concepts underlying what you’re doing. The field is just too wide and rapidly changing for any source of info to be authoritative (and stay authoritative indefinitely after the guide is written), so it’s super important to develop the skill of looking up multiple different and possibly conflicting approaches to the task, thinking critically about them, and then synthesizing your own approach that works for your specific situation.
without developing at least some actual understanding of the concepts underlying what you’re doing
I realize lemmy hates AI, but I use Grok a lot to explain commands, command sequences, etc. Those go in my notes as well, after I’ve refined them, and conformed them to my application. Of course, all the precautions one should take with any online tut in place, and pulling knowledge from multiple sources helps verify. Grok helps me out a ton.
I like YunoHost. That’s an all-in-one solution to do the selfhosting for you. So you won’t learn a lot about the intricate details of the tech, but you can install things with a few clicks. That’s nice if you just want to use stuff. And that project has some track-record. I’m using it for years to self-host Peertube, Immich a Nextcloud and a few other things.
Thanks, bookmarked and depending upon my ability to learn, plus time available, this, or something like it may be the way for me.
+1 for yunohost, though it can be a slow solution. However it will get something up and running easily, provide certs etc. and let you start out on self-hosting. With a half decent old pc you can host a load of services. You could run your own lemmy instance for example. However a lot of newer things are often broken or fail to work in Yunohost (funkwhale and discourse are a couple of things that are beyond redemption)_
To move your photos from google I recommend Immich. Is available as a docker container, or yunohost though don’t use the official yunohost version there is a better version that supports HEIC and some other formats. You can find that here though
https://codeberg.org/Loowiz/immich-docker_ynh
It is still easily installed using yunohost but upgrades are manual
The traditional way is man pages and howto guides, which contain loads of information. You can get man pages in terminal or html (but I can remember how).
Next up is online tutorials like you are using, however with complicated setups, like a full mail server, the info gets very specific and can often go out of date.
Then we have readthedocs, which are the project specific instructions which tend to be very good.
How ever my personal favourite is the arch wiki, you’ll need to know how to change commands to Debian based systems, but it does give a lot of info and insight that is up to date.
For moving from Goole photos look at photoprism, immich and nextcloud, there are others, but these are the ones that made my short list
This is valuable, thank you
The guides on Perfect Media Server are also pretty good
Thank you! Bookmarked
I thought / expected this, and hopefully, I can learn as I go. Grateful for your confirmation