This is a wiki knowledge base on building a home server and document all the steps for further reference.
The goal is to have a replacement of Google drive, to have a self-built, self-hosted, self-managed file storage cloud service for personal use. I want to detach from Big Tech as much as possible. So the number one goal is privacy, at the expense of convenience and features.
The primary use case is access from mobile phones, upload photos, videos, share links between family, store important docs with encryption.
The steps documented here include
If you want to replicate and build something similar: the hardware bit will likely be very different as it depends what could you acquire, but if you are happy with selected software and want to use the exact same stack then these steps are fairly generic and could be basically just copied.
My system is planned to be used by ~20 people, and most of them will use it very lightly, and maybe 3-5 power users having lots of data. The internet I have at home is crap so it wouldn't allow serving more people anyway. The data disks are 2x8TB NAS drives, intended to be running in mirrored software RAID. This is the second huge advantage of self-hosting, the price of the drives is much less than paying for this amount of cloud storage. The electricity costs will be between 10-15 Eur/mo.
Follow this link for the detailed hardware wiki.
Using Debian 11. If you are happy with this choice or using a .deb based system, please read along: Installing OS
The main piece of software is NextCloud, the most feature-rich cloud software available, currently at version 26. The service will be running in a docker environment behind a reverse proxy.
If you plan to use NextCloud too, read along: