Welcome tomy digital home.

A collection of self-hosted services, experiments, and infrastructure that power my everyday life.

Jump back in

Why thisexists.

Before this, our photos were scattered. Flash drives, external hard drives, old phones, no real copies anywhere. One lost drive and years of pictures are gone.

5 years of photos of my child, since birth, live in that pile. Losing them is not an option, so a real 3-2-1 backup stopped being optional.

I could not decide how to store them properly. Microsoft 365 for 1TB, split across six accounts for 6TB. Google Drive at 200GB. iCloud. None of it felt right for photos going back to 2013.

So instead of picking a plan, I built the storage myself.

4 TB

Storage

13

Years of photos

24/7

Always on

₱5,200

Saved so far

How it fitstogether.

Traffic comes in from the left and ends at the services the family actually opens.

  • Internet

    Nothing open to the outside

    • Tailscale

      A private tunnel in, so no ports have to be open

      • TP-Link Wi-Fi 6

        The home router everything connects to

        • AdGuard DNS

          Every lookup passes here first, ads get dropped

          • TrueNAS

            One machine, on 24/7, running everything below

            • Immich

              Photos and videos, the one thing we back up

              • Backblaze B2

                Encrypted copy in the cloud

              • External HDD

                A copy we can hold, kept unplugged

            • Jellyfin

              Movies and shows for the TVs

            • Encyclomejia

              Scanned IDs, receipts, and records

            • Minecraft

              Rix Marcus's world

What itactually runs.

Everything the family used to pay for monthly, grouped by what it's for.

Photos & Shows

Thousands of family photos. Hundreds of movie nights. Much less money spent on subscriptions.

Immich

Google Photos, but the cloud is in my house.

Jellyfin

₱600/month, random sign-outs, and midnight OTP requests. You know that popular streaming site, right? Jellyfin solved all three.

Staying Protected

Running your own services also means becoming your own IT department.

AdGuard Home

The family wanted to play games. The games wanted the family to watch ads. There was a disagreement. No more ads now.

Tailscale

Only me and the family can access all of these when we're outside the home network.

No web app

Files & Documents

The boring stuff, until someone needs it in the next five minutes.

TrueNAS

A hardworking little machine that never gets a day off. You know, unless there's a power loss.

Encyclomejia

Birth certificates, passports, warranties... finally in one place.

Just for Fun

Sometimes the best infrastructure investment is making your kid smile.

Minecraft Server

The most important service in the homelab, according to Rix.

No web app

One machine,everything on it.

One machine runs all eight services. It stays on 24/7, survives brownouts on its own, and I can reach all of it from anywhere through Tailscale.

Processor

Intel i3-8100

Enough to run all eight services at once.

Storage

4 TB Seagate NAS

Built for drives that never get to rest.

Boot drive

128 GB SSD

Keeps the system off the storage drive.

Power

Brownout-capable

Brownouts happen here. When the power cuts, the server rides it out and turns itself back on the moment electricity returns, so nobody has to be home to press anything.

Network

TP-Link Wi-Fi 6

An ordinary router. AdGuard Home does the interesting part.

Parts came together slowly, bought piece by piece while waiting for a sale on a full system. RAM came cheap off Shopee early on. The 4TB drive was ₱3,500, bought right before AI demand pushed drive prices toward ₱15,000.

Along the way, the ₱400 a month we were paying for Google and iCloud storage helped make the case for building instead of renting.

I built it in the span of three months back when we were in Mandaluyong City. It started as an open-air build on a desk, no case. It now runs in an NZXT case with Deepcool fans.

How backupswork.

A simple 1-2-3 backup plan keeps everything, especially the family's photos, safe in more than one place.

Live

The NAS

Every photo and file starts on the homelab's storage.

Off-site

Backblaze B2

An encrypted copy in the cloud, updated on its own.

3

Offline

External drive

A copy we keep unplugged, in case the rest goes wrong.