How I repurposed my old gaming PC to set up a home server for data storage, backups, and self-hosted apps.
For the longest time, I’ve procrastinated on finding a good backup and storage solution for my Fujifilm RAW files. My solution up until recently involved manually copying my photos across two external SSD drives. This was quite a hassle and I hadn’t yet figured out a good off-site backup strategy.
After hearing constant news updates of how hard drive prices have been surging due to AI data center buildouts, I finally decided to purchase some hard drives and set up a homelab to meet my storage and backup needs. I also used this opportunity to explore self-hosting some apps I’ve been eager to check out.
I repurposed my old gaming PC I built back in 2018 for this use case. This machine has the following specs:
I purchased the Western Digital hard drives over the winter holiday break. The other components were already installed on the machine when I originally built it.
TrueNAS Operating System#
On this machine I installed TrueNAS Community Edition on my NVMe drive. It’s a Linux-based operating system that is well-tailored for network-attached storage (NAS), file storage that is accessible to any device on your network.
My TrueNAS dashboard running version 25.10.1 (Goldeye)
For instance, TrueNAS allows you to create snapshots of your data. This is great for preventing data loss. If, for example, you accidentally deleted a file, you could recover it from a previous snapshot containing that file. In other words, a file is only truly deleted if and only if the system has no snapshots containing that file.
I’ve set up my machine to take hourly, daily, and even weekly snapshots. I’ve also configured it to delete old snapshots after a given period of time to save storage space.
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