I don’t have a home server yet but I’m exploring and sometimes I get confused about some posts here.
For example I saw a post asking for recommendation for a “self hosted budget management app”. Can’t you just install this type of app to your phone or pc? What’s the purpose here, will you host it and access it from a browser? Or do you only want to backup its data to your server?
I hope I don’t sound stupid please enlighten me.
Most people want services to be synced across devices. Using the budget app example, I just couldn’t possibly do all of my budget tasks from my phone alone. It’s too limited of a screen size and not all features are available within the app.
It’s mostly about syncing data between your different devices, without having to use a cloud service. I want to be able to organize the budget on my PC and look it up on my phone for example, without having to keep my PC running or manually sync them.
Another aspect is backups and redundancy. My NAS has all my data, and it does an encrypted cloud backup every night. I don’t have to remember that or make sure it gets the latest changes, because it’s always running and always up to date.
It’s also just a fun little hobby to tinker with it and figure things out.
Can’t you just install this type of app to your phone or pc?
For one instance of app, it’s possible to install it onto a single machine.
Things get tricky when you want to access the data from multiple devices. Even trickier, when several people want to access it. After a certain point, it’s easier to have a “cloud” solution. And since “cloud” is just somebody’s else computer, why not make this a computer YOU own?
if someone wrote an open source free solution for you to self-host i think its just rude not to use it. so self-hosting is just being polite
I like this logic.
Mint is probably the largest budget app out there and they just announced that they will be going away at the end of this year. Many of us have years of data in Mint that we are about to lose.
Experience has taught me to avoid depending on third party services for something I could self-host.
What selfhosted app do you recommend for budget?
I don’t have a replacement yet, but I plan to look at Firefly III.
I use firefly for spending categorization. I haven’t gotten into any of the budgeting stuff.
IMO the biggest drop off from mint is the lack of automated synchronizing of account transactions. I’m currently just dumping transaction csv’s monthly and importing then, which is easy enough.
Firefly is great, and I’m still on an older version that just works. Takes some effort to get imports auto classified, but once you do it’s stupid fast to categorize your spending and see trends.
My wife loooooves when I spend my evening going through my latest batch of unclassified firefly transactions. But the perfect pie chart is worth it.
Google recently had several cases of - which looks to be a developing situation - user personal data losses in the google drive side of operations
Thats right, the SaaS infrastructure that is based on storing user data on a cloud system lost about months of user data
Netflix recently also starting pulling toxic, egregious changes such that its basically insulting to people giving money to them
Microsoft even has a clause somewhere in their contract regardingn OneDrive/Sharepoint that they cannot or will not guarantee the safety against loss for your data…
