UPDATE: To everyone who suggested YUNO, thank you so much. This seems like it is about to make my journey much easier. It is basically almost exactly what I was looking for, but I was unaware that it existed.
Thank you ALL for your suggestions, actually. It’s a bit overwhelming for an almost complete noobie but I an going to look into all of the suggestions in time. I just saw that there were several mentions of YUNO so I decided to make that one of the first things I investigated.

So, about two months ago, I had a very eye opening experience. As the result of a single misconfigured security setting on my Android, I was locked out of my Google Account on my phone AND all of my PCs. I had no access whatsoever to Google, or any of the literally hundreds of services that I get through Google.

This is when I realized that I relied entirely on Google/Android because those two days were actually very difficult, being cut off from media, services, passwords, everything, from the past almost twenty years of my life, could be taken away from me in an instant. The decades of my life that were locked away in my Google Account included hundreds of thousands of pictures, almost a hundred thousand audio tracks, several hundred books, several hundred apps, thousands of videos, etc. ad infinitum. Unfortunately, very little of this material was backed up at that point. That is my fault. Also, the misconfigured security setting was my fault as well.

The amount of data, media, memories, services, etc. that would have been lost is actually endless and it would have affected my life in several ridiculously negative ways.

Luckily, in the end, I was able to get my access back and then basically immediately grabbed all of the several terabytes of information and media of mine that they had, and that I was almost locked out of. I have it all in my house now on a drive in my computer, with a backup made on another disconnected disk.

I then decided that no corporation was ever going to have such an insanely high level of influence on and control over my entire life and my media ever again. That experience was actually very scary.

I’ve been trying to get into SelfHosting, but am finding it quite daunting and difficult.

There is a LOT of stuff that I have to learn, and I am mostly unsure of where to even begin. I know basically nothing about networking.

I need to learn the very basic stuff and work my way up from there, but everything that I’ve seen on the Internet assumes that the reader already has a basic to intermediate understanding of networking and the subjects that surround it. I do not, but I am going to learn.

I just need someone to show me where to start.

Thanks in advance for any assistance!

  • Pika@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    2·
    8 days ago

    Keepass is a great way of password management, I use keepass as well. I also use syncthing to sync my password database across all devices and then I have the server acting as the “always on” device so I have access to all passwords at all times. Works amazing because syncthing can also be setup so when a file is modified by another device, it makes a backup of the original file and moves it to a dedicated folder (with retention settings so you can have them cleaned every so often). Life is so much easier.

    For photo access you can look into immich, its a little more of an advanced setup but, I have immich looking at my photos folder in syncthing on the server, and using that location as the source. This allows me to use one directory for both photo hosting and backup/sync

    • MTZ@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      9 hours ago

      Do you know anywhere that I could find a guide on how to set that up correctly? I’ve used SyncThing in the very recent past and it ended up being not good because of my own ignorance. I have syncthing on my phone and my desktop, but neither of them are syncing anything to anywhere. I’m terrified that I will mess something up and possibly lose data, or end up with a gigantic mess of files that do not belong in the synced directory. That’s what happened the only time I ever did use Syncthing. For some reason, it basically transferred a gigantic directory of things that were not relevant at all from my PC to my phone, filling up all of the storage and it was a hassle to get rid of everything that was not supposed to be there. I REALLY want the KeePass databases on my phone and on my main PC to communicate and update each other though. Entering everything in twice has been frustrating.

      • Pika@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        15 minutes ago

        I haven’t used a guide aside from the official getting started with syncthing page.

        It should be similar to these steps though, I’ll use your desktop as the origin device.

        1. install syncthing on all devices you want to be syncing with
        2. on your desktop syncthing page, click “add remote device” and add the device ID of your phone(found on your phones syncthing app), you can also add any other device you want to have communications with (you will need to approve this action on the phone as well so be on the lookout for a notification)
        3. make a backup of your current keepass file just in case these steps shouldn’t cause files to change but, since the end goal is syncing two devices that you have mentioned have differences with files with the same name better safe than sorry
        4. create a keepass share on one of the devices (the folder path of this file should be wherever your keepass file is stored on your device. If this file is in a folder with a bunch of other files, you may want to move the file to it’s own subfolder or you will end up sharing all of the files in that path)
        5. under file versioning chose what type of file version control you want. I prefer staggered since it when a remote device changes the file it moves the old file to a folder, and then deletes them according to the settings
        6. at this point you should double check the name of your mobile devices keepass file name, if its the same as the name of the db on the desktop, you should rename it prior to continuing. Keepass should be able to detect a file conflict and rename it on it’s own but, better safe than sorry.
        7. share the folder with the device you want to sync it(your phone in this case)
        8. Your phone should get a notification that a device wants to share something with it. Approve it, be careful not to clear it because it’s a pain in the butt to get that notification back if you accidentally deny or swipe it away, the mobile app isn’t /amazing/ with it’s UI (but it has gotten better)
        9. once approved configure it to where you wanted the file to be on your mobile device.
        10. You should be done at this point. Syncthing should be automatically syncing the keepass files between the two

        Some things you may want to keep into consideration. Syncthing only operates when there are two devices or more that are online. I would recommend if you are getting into self hosting a server, having the server be the middle man. If you end up going that route these steps stay more or less the same, it’s just instead of sharing with the phone, its sharing with the server, and then moving to the server syncthing page and sharing with the mobile. This makes it so both devices use the server instead of trying to connect to each other. Additionally, if you do go that route, I recommend setting your remote devices on the server’s syncthing instance to “auto approve” this makes it so when you share a folder to the server from one of your devices, it automatically approves and makes a share using the name of the folder shared in the syncthing’s data directory. (ex. if your folder was named documents and you shared it to the server, it would create a share named “documents” in where-ever you have it configured to store data). You would still need to login to the server instance in the case of sharing said files to /another/ device, but if your intent was to only create a backup of a folder to the server, then it removes a step.

        Another benefit that using the server middleman approach is that if you ever have to change a device later on down the road, you are only having to add 1 remote device to the server instance, instead of having to add your new device onto every syncthing that needs access to that device.

        Additionally, if you already have the built in structure but it isn’t seeming like it is working, some standard troubleshooting steps I’ve found helpful:

        • if trying to share between devices, make sure that there is at least two devices that are connected as remote devices active in order to sync
        • If above is true, make sure the folder ID’s are the same between both devices. that is how syncthing detects folders that should be sync’d
        • If also true, make sure the devices are being seen as online in remote devices. If it isn’t showing as online, the connection is being blocked somewhere, verify you don’t have a firewall or router blocking it somewhere.