After years of tinkering with computing devices, I’ve accumulated huge volumes of data – including photos from my childhood, movies I’ve bought over the last decade, and the ebook library I’ve painstakingly built. As if that’s not enough, the other denizens of my household also create GBs of data every month. Luckily, I’ve got a reliable set of self-hosted applications to help me manage all these files.

Jellyfin

The true self-hosted media server, unlike Plex

The home lab landscape has several applications designed to organize movies and TV shows, but Jellyfin is hands-down the best tool for the job. I’d relied on Plex for years, though its slow transition to a cloud-based setup has turned me away from the application. Although Jellyfin’s UI may seem clunky compared to Plex’s polished interface, it includes a plethora of features without costing a penny.

For starters, I’ve got media files in a variety of file formats and resolutions, making Jellyfin’s transcoding support borderline essential for streaming them to my client devices. My Jellyfin admin account is also stored locally on my home lab, and doesn’t require external authentication from Plex servers. Plus, Jellyfin’s mobile app is a lot more usable than it used to be back in the day, and it’s compatible with several plugins that boost my media server’s utility even further.

Calibre-Web

My personal ebook library

I started collecting ebooks when I got my first tablet as a teenager. Needless to say, I’ve got a massive volume of ebooks that span my ever-changing tastes. Throw in the academic textbooks and research papers I acquired during my university days, and you can imagine the sheer chaos that’s my ebook library.

Fortunately, I ran into Calibre-Web during my self-hosting escapades, and this app helped me turn my cluttered ebook collection into a respectable library. Between custom shelves, robust tagging provisions, and metadata editing tools, Calibre-Web makes it easy to organize my ebooks, while the OPDS support and compatibility with multiple file formats let me binge-read books from any device in my computing arsenal.

Immich

A solid Google Photos alternative

With all the privacy-intrusive services in Google’s app suite, I’ve been trying to switch to self-hosted FOSS alternatives for storing my personal information. My private photos are a great example of the data I wish to keep out of third-party servers, and that’s before you consider the subscription fees I’d have to pay to store 20+ GB of every image, video, clip, and screenshot I’ve captured over the last decade.

As such, I use Immich to organize the photos I’ve stored on my NAS. Besides an easy-to-use UI that’s extremely similar to Google Photos, Immich includes custom tags and GPU-powered image search provisions. Unlike typical FOSS services, Immich has a useful mobile app that can even back up all my screenshots and pictures to my NAS share automatically.

Syncthing

It’s not for backups, though

Before I talk about the perks of Syncthing, let me clarify that it’s not a substitute for a backup service. Instead, it’s a file-synchronization server that can automatically create, modify, or even delete files using multi-directional links between different systems. My data-hoarding self uses it to instantly transfer files between all the devices in my home lab.

For instance, I run all my coding experiments inside virtualized Windows 11, Arch Linux, and NixOS environments instead of my daily driver. Whenever I end up with a semi-functional project, I transfer it to my Syncthing folder, so I can access the files locally from my MacBook and everyday PC. I also like to add important docker-compose.yml configurations into a single document, which automatically gets updated across multiple nodes thanks to multi-directional Syncthing links.

Paperless-ngx

Great for managing documents

Managing tax documents, fee receipts, product invoices, warranty certificates, bank documents, and all the other bogus records ranks pretty high on the list of chores I despise. As if the fact that these files can accumulate very quickly isn’t bad enough, searching for that one specific tax filing when I’ve got dozens of similar-looking records on my PC makes document management even more aggravating.

That’s why you’ll often find me recommending Paperless-ngx, as it’s single-handedly the reason I managed to organize my essential documents. Thanks to a mixture of automatic OCR, automatic tagging, and full text search provisions, Paperless-ngx makes tracking individual files a cakewalk. Heck, it can even pull attachments directly from my emails! While the data managed by my Paperless-ngx container is minuscule compared to the sheer volume of movies and TV shows on my Jellyfin server, I consider it one of the most important services in my application stack.

Kopia

To back up my daily drivers

Switching to applications that cater to my backup needs, I rely on Kopia to store the data from my normal, non-workstation systems. The incremental nature of the snapshots makes the entire backup process quite fast, while the deduplication facility prevents duplicate files from occupying extra space on my NAS.

Not to mention, it also links to Backblaze, S3 buckets, Azure Blob storage, and a couple of other cloud platforms if you want 3-2-1 backup support. Personally, I prefer using Rclone to sync my data with a NAS server hosted at a family member’s house.

Proxmox Backup Server

To back up everything else in my home lab

While I adore my Kopia container, I consider my Proxmox Backup Server the most important part of my data-hoarding suite. That’s because my PBS server syncs the LXC and VM data for my Proxmox systems, and if you’ve read my recent articles, you’ve probably realized that the majority of the nodes in my home lab run PVE.

Like Kopia, PBS supports incremental backups and includes deduplication provisions, though 3-2-1 backups are slightly more complex to implement here. I’ve connected my PBS instance with my primary NAS over an NFS share, which may not be very optimal, but it still gets the job done.

There’s a never-ending list of apps for data-hoarders

If you’re still looking for some self-hosted services that can help you manage your data, I’ve got some more tools that deserve a shout-out. For audiophiles who like being in charge of their own music files, you’ll find Navidrome a solid addition to your home lab. While Calibre-Web is great for storing all sorts of ebooks, I prefer Kavita for my comics, graphic novels, manga, and other illustration-heavy books. There’s also Nextcloud, though I use it more as a collaboration platform and a Microsoft 365 alternative rather than a storage server.