Think about power consumption of your hardware. If it is supposed to run 24/7 this can add up over a year. The money could be invested in power efficient hardware instead. There are calculators online

Not really answering the whole question, but you really don’t need a lot. Currently running jellyfin, a blog and some other fun dockers on a raspberry pi (clone), with an external nas though a large USB would do. Start with just “retrieving” movies to your local disk and think what else you need.

• want to access movies between devices? Get some cheap server (I.e some second hand computer) or a NAS
• want to have some snazzy UI? Get jellyfin
• Want to be able to expand storage? Set up some raid configuration or similar.

Good story about overcomplicating things

My main reasons are sailing the high seas

If this is the goal, then you need to concern yourself with your network first and the computer/server second. You need as much operational control over your home network as you can manage, you need to put this traffic in a separate tunnel from all of your normal network traffic and have it pop up on the public network from a different location. You need to own the modem that links you to your provider’s network, and the router that is the entry/exit point for your network. You need to segregate the thing doing the sailing on its own network segment that doesn’t have direct access to any of your other devices. You can not use the combo modem/router gateway device provided by your ISP. You need to plan your internal network intentionally and understand how, when, and why each device transmits on the network. You should understand your firewall configuration (on your network boundary, not on your PC). You should also get PiHole up and running and start dropping unwanted inbound and outbound traffic.

OpSec first.

For Photos the lazy route is to just pay Hetzner 5$ a month for 1TB storage and Nextcloud
https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-share/
(I tried this for a month and loved it, decided to then host myself)

The not lazy route is to host Nextcloud yourself, but because it’s important thigns like your family photos, you need to be sure your backups are solid.

I bought myself a Hardkernel H4+ and will be setting it up as a NAS with Nextcloud

Raspberry Pi 4 (with its linux distribution) and an external usb hard drive attached. Install whatever service you want on it. I have Jellyfin and openproject (previously redmine) on it. This mini thingy sits without monitor, keyboard or mouse somewhere next to my router and connected with an ethernet cable. Works flawlessly.

If you have an old laptop sitting around, put a linux server or NAS distro on it and start tinkering. There can be a lot of analysis paralysis with this stuff. Sometimes it’s best to just try and fail and learn and try again. More likely you’ll try and succeed and realize other wants and needs and redo it a year later. I think that’s why it makes for a great hobby. Lots to learn and improve upon.

Start small, on your local network. Maybe something like paperless-ngx: not very demanding of resources, and (I assume) easy to backup/migrate. You could see about putting it on truenas to get a sense of what that process is like. I personally like to keep a nas and server separate, then mount the nas on the server.

I’ve found owncloud a bit complex and prefer dedicated solutions. For the seas, servarr apps come up a lot. Paperless ngx for docs. Immich (or ente) for photos/vid. If you’re just starting out, installing on linux and/or using docker is going to be your shortest path to success. proxmox or other VMs can complicate things if you’re not familiar.

I know there is unRAID and TrueNAS, but I went with a traditional NAS (Synology, before all the fuckery) and a small N100 NUC on the side.
The NAS is critical for the whole family with backups, pictures and general files, so I need it to be 110%. On it, I just run the .arr stack, Surveilance Station and Qbit, and the NUC runs all my other containers like Jellyfin and Home Assistant. Full access to the files via NFS and it gives me good power for transcoding when needed. Even 4K high bitrate files play seamlessly on WiFi now.

It’s been rock solid and I would probably do it the same way again if I had to rebuild.

Best of luck finding the appropriate solution for your needs, mate!

Just sailing? Single hard drive connected to what ever

Hosting stuff you care about? Some form of raid/zfs/whatever with at least 2 discs and a backup plan, also hooked up to what ever

That is the bare minimum. Buy used and expect your needs to change within a month/year.

@xtapa@discuss.tchncs.de You don’t need a “NAS” per se – just running a baremetal distro and using containers in it will suffice.
Further, while Nextcloud can work fine, I’d suggest not using it and going for individual solutions instead of something AIO – NC is fairly clunky, and fairly slow comparatively. It’s also PHP.
I personally use Proxmox + LXC/VMs in one Micro PC (i5-7xxx/24G), and Just Ubuntu with Docker compose in another(i5-6xxx/16G) alongside a couple of Oracle VMs. It works out fairly well.
For Digitizing paperwork and mail, paperless-ngx is a good solution. For your pirate ship, look into *arr solutions. jellyseerr -> sonarr/radarr -> bazarr -> jellyfin works fine.

You can run a NAS with any Linux distro - your limiting factor is having enough drive storage. You might want to consider something that’s great at using virtual machines (e.g., Proxmox) if you don’t like Docker, but I have almost everything I want running in Docker and haven’t needed to spin up a single virtual machine.

Is owncloud or an alternative enough, or do I need something more elaborated like TrueNAS?

I run a Nextcloud for my family and then serve the same folders again via samba to the same users. Don’t need a separate NAS for this, just activate the samba service on the same machine.

Regarding the pirate ship, I don’t know. I haven’t tried that yet.

I have a home media server (which may or may not host an arr stack) running on a 5 year old i5 NUC withb16Gb RAM and two USB external SSDs for storage.

So far it manages for the household (3 users) perfectly fine.