From a simple college project to a full-blown home server. A personal story about building a homelab, surviving data scares, and the joy of DIY tech.

It all started with a simple idea. I was in college, learning about IT, and I wanted to put some of that theory into practice. The plan was modest: set up a Proxmox server with a couple of virtual machines. Easy enough, right?

Well, that’s where the rabbit hole began.

A stubborn DNS issue sent me searching for answers, and one thing led to another. Before I knew it, I was at a recycling center buying a stack of used hard drives—five 4TB drives and two 1TB drives. My simple VM project was suddenly morphing into a full-blown backup server.

Assembling the Beast from Scraps and Deals

Most of the server is built from the bones of my old gaming PC. I found a bigger case for just $20, an Apevia Telstar Junior, which gave me a bit more room to work with. The heart of the machine is a Ryzen 7 5800X CPU with a whopping 96GB of DDR4 RAM.

Here’s a little secret: the giant Thermaltake Assassin CPU cooler is held in place with zip ties. I lost the metal brackets during the build, but hey, it works. The CPU usage rarely even cracks 50%, so it’s more than enough.

For networking, I wanted a fast connection between my main PC and the server, so I snagged two 10GbE network cards. My setup also includes a 2.5GbE card, but for some reason, I can’t get it to work. I think it might be because I have it in a 16x PCIe slot, but the lights on the switch tell me it’s connected. It’s one of those little mysteries I still need to solve.

The server needed a GPU because the CPU doesn’t have integrated graphics. A cheap NVIDIA Quadro 4000 does the trick. It’s not for gaming, just for getting a picture on the screen. To handle all those hard drives, I added a dedicated SATA controller card, which I passed through to a TrueNAS virtual machine. This is where I store everything—1:1 copies of my PC’s drives and all my Blender projects.

The Data Scare That Changed Everything

I’m not a command-line wizard. I’m especially paranoid about using rsync after one particularly terrifying incident.

I was trying to reformat my drives from NTFS to a new file system and needed to move all my data to the backup server first. I used rsync to copy everything over. The problem happened when I tried to move it all back. I typed the command wrong. In an instant, it looked like I had deleted my entire backup. All of it. Gone.

My heart sank. I spent the rest of the day frantically trying to recover the files. I almost shelled out hundreds of dollars for professional recovery software.

And then I found the problem. The files weren’t deleted at all. The rsync command had just completely messed up the file permissions. One simple chown command later, and everything was back. All my data was safe.

After that scare, I switched to a tool called FreeFileSync. It does the same thing as rsync but with a graphical user interface, which makes it much harder to accidentally wipe out your entire digital life. It’s a lesson I won’t forget.

What’s Next for the Homelab?

This server has been an incredible learning experience, but I’m already hitting its limits. The case is cramped, and I want to add even more hard drives. The next big upgrade will be a proper server case and motherboard that can handle more storage. I also want to get drives with matching speeds to avoid any bottlenecks.

Beyond just storage, I’m excited to explore more advanced topics. I want to set up my own proxy servers, mess with firewalls like pfSense, and build a media server for the house.

The ultimate dream? Building a dedicated render server for my Blender projects. My current GPU does the job, but offloading those heavy renders to a separate machine would be amazing. I’m hoping to find a way to have it power on automatically when a render starts and shut down when it’s finished to save on the electricity bill.

This whole journey started as a small college project, but it’s become a full-fledged hobby. Sixty percent of the time, I feel like I have no idea what I’m doing, but figuring things out—even through near-disasters—is what makes it so much fun. Every problem solved is a new skill learned. And it all started with one little server.