Too much fun, or too much work? (an essay 😜)

Around 2018, I heard of Plex and what it did. I figured, instead of having all these DVDs and VHS tapes (yes, still), I'd be able to digitize it all and just get my media in a much more convenient way. Cut the cable, or so to speak. I started poking around Ubuntu, but the desktop edition didnt work well as a server. Ran into many problems just trying to get Plex right. But I eventually did. I heard of Unraid online. I decided to give it a try, and at the same time, pandemic hit. My son had to stay in from school, wife and myself were 'parked' at home. I toyed with the idea of starting a Minecraft server so my son could keep in touch with all his friends. Unraid opened that up for me, and I even got into the game myself. Playing with my 8-yr old and his friends was a blast. Then came my darker time, when one of my 8TB drives died because of a misconfiguration. Had to knock on every door to access the contents of the ZFS drive so I could extract personal pics and a barebones list of the media i had in there. Took me months to get back what was lost (imagine all my tech sprawled over the floor with a drive connected to SATA and power hanging from the side of my workstation pc... and my dear wife complaining daily about the mess). Almost hit depression. But i fixed it in the end, and I learned so much about self-hosting, RAID, ZFS, Docker, VMs, and especially networking. It was an enlightening experience. Thank you to all who helped and taught me along the way - you know who you are. Today, the best thing in my life is Unraid's Autoupdate plugin, which basically just sends me a Telegram telling me it upgraded a bunch of apps. I don't even have to worry about the server anymore. I do run manual checks every so often, like once a week, just be on the safe side. I also vacuum the whole server once a year to ensure no dust accumulates. But I digress. My point here is this: I run a 64TB Unraid server on a Ryzen 5 with 64GB RAM. It has Plex/Jellyfin, has a NextCloud to replace Google Drive, Immich to replace Google Photos, and I even have a tiny HP G8 Microserver offsite running weekly backups of everything. ALL is automated, not one human is required to operate. And THAT is the most beautiful thing about it. I'm glad I went through these learning pains. But the best feeling is when it disappears and I don't have to fiddle with it. Much better to be able to chill with the fambly and watch great flicks. Tech should serve humans, not burden them . So spend time on your machine, but spend time with your family too. That time is irreplaceable.❤️