A behind-the-scenes look at the hardware, network, and infrastructure that power our family’s self-hosted cloud across three sites: home, a Hetzner VPS, and an edge node at my in-laws.

TL;DR A hidden TimescaleDB retention policy almost deleted four years of my self-hosted Traccar GPS history. The policy came from the database layer, not from the Traccar config I usually checked. I was able to restore my full history from backups, remove the retention jobs, and stop the silent cleanup. That incident pushed me away from file-level backup thinking and towards a Kubernetes-native PostgreSQL setup with CloudNativePG, Barman Cloud, MinIO, Longhorn, and GitOps. You do not need to copy my full stack to learn from this, but you should make sure your backups are real, restorable, and aligned with the data you actually care about. I’ve been living with self-hosted infrastructure for years: email, messaging, photo storage, home automation, and all the small services that quietly support everyday family life. ...

Self-hosting your family’s digital life can feel a bit like building a secret base in your living room. On the surface, it’s just laptops and phones. Underneath, it’s a quiet network of services, tunnels, and certificates that keeps everything running. ...