Benjamin

I’ve been running infrastructure at home for longer than I probably should admit. It started back in the early 2000s with something straightforward: I needed somewhere to keep my media. Videos, sure, but mostly an extensive photo collection that was already getting out of hand. Cloud storage was either non-existent or laughably small back then, so a home server made sense. The setup stayed pretty static for years until maybe six or seven years ago when home automation hardware finally got interesting. I’m talking about actual usable stuff, not the traditional automation systems like KNX or DALI that required dedicated infrastructure and a second mortgage. Suddenly you could automate things without rewiring your entire house or calling in specialists. That opened up a whole new reason to have local infrastructure. ...

There’s something about running your own infrastructure that makes sense once you’ve been collecting data for long enough. Not in a paranoid way - just practical. When you’ve got over 2TB of personal stuff spanning 25 years - photos and videos from the ’90s, documents you’ve saved over the years - you start caring about where it actually lives. Add an extensive media library of over 30TB and a growing collection of more than 100 home sensors, and the question shifts from “should I run a homelab?” to “what’s the right way to build one?”. ...

Over the past 25 years of tracking my digital footprint, I’ve accumulated approximately 2.1 TB of personal data. This includes around 170 GB of documents (75,000 files, excluding emails), 1.6 TB of videos dating back to 2004 (11,000 clips), and 380 GB of photos taken since the 1990s (64,000 images, not counting my analogue archive of about 15,000 prints). This isn’t just a technical archive—it’s a living record of my experiences, creativity, and personal history. ...