2 posts tagged with "Homelab"

In my post last month about rethinking my personal tech stack, I had mentioned that I had been using Ente Photos as an alternative to Google Photos, but had also been evaluating Immich. I also mentioned that one day in the future I might move over to Immich after figuring out a better backup strategy for my HomeLab.

That day came this month as I had some time to figure out the last few items I needed to feel secure in using Immich as my primary photo platform, running entirely on my Beelink S12 Pro running Proxmox.

Several years ago, I bought a Synology DS920+ to use as a network attached storage (NAS) appliance in the house. I don't work as a photographer or video editor so my work doesn't really have any massive storage needs; rather, I wanted someplace to host media for the family that didn't require an ongoing subscription service to access. For a few years, it served that purpose almost exclusively, both as a drive I could mount and as a Plex server.

Recently, I had begun tinkering with a few other services and seeing how far I could push my Synology. It has a Container Manager service that allows you to run Docker containers, although the interface is very GUI-driven and there's always a few gotchas. For example, Synology reserves port 80 and 443 for their own web station and reverse proxy services, which makes it difficult to run your own reverse proxy on the device.

For these reasons, I started to consider buying a separate device to act as a home server and repository for all my containers that I would have full control over, and relegate the Synology back to its role as just dumb storage.