Howdy! I'm the author of PhotoStructure, which is mentioned on this post a couple times already. I've been self-hosting email and photos and playing with rever

Howdy! I'm the author of PhotoStructure, which is mentioned on this post a couple times already. I've been self-hosting email and photos and playing with reverse proxies and VPNs for several decades. There's always a ton to learn about. This is a journey, not a destination. The biggest thing to avoid is being overwhelmed. It's super easy to just throw in the towel and give up because there are gobsmacking numbers of alternatives to everything, and everyone has _opinions_. I've got a couple bits of general advice that should be fairly universal truths, and should help guide your journey: 1. Storage is important for all your bullet items. Know that lots of copies keeps stuff safe. Have an offline and, if possible, offsite backup of the stuff you'd be sad if you lost. Encrypt the private stuff (before it goes off to the cloud, ideally). Read more here: https://photostructure.com/faq/how-do-i-safely-store-files https://photostructure.com/faq/how-do-i-safely-store-files Once you know you're stuff isn't going to disappear (because you have backups), it makes updates and trying out new stuff much less stressful! 2. Reduce your externally-available footprint. Ideally, the only access to any of your servers should be through a VPN between your phone/laptop and your server. The less that is externally available, the better. (hint: turn off your Synology's cloud access stuff if possible, asap). 3. Harden your servers. I wrote up a basic guide, and there are ton of others--but only run commands you understand. https://forum.photostructure.com/t/server-hardening-for-beginners/1027 https://forum.photostructure.com/t/server-hardening-for-begi... 4. The more the exotic your setup, the less likely things will work out of the box, and the harder it will be for someone else to reproduce your issue. 5. Look for friendly communities that will, ideally, let you bounce ideas off of them and guide you to making fewer mistakes. There are several subreddits (like /r/selfhosted)--just remember to ignore the trolls. PhotoStructure has a discord, but it has several orders of magnitude fewer members than the popular subreddits. 6. Take any tutorial with a grain of salt. A frustrating majority are outdated. Many were written by interns or by people trying to figure it out for themselves, but in any event, aren't experts. Good luck!