Guide
Files, photos and shared links for a household — three ways to build it, and the one thing all of them require you to decide first.
Every family cloud starts with the same decision, and it is not which application to install. It is where the data lives and what happens when that disk dies. A subscription hid that question behind someone else’s redundancy; running it yourself puts it back in front of you on day one. Decide the backup target before the first upload — another disk, another building, or both — and then test a restore once, while the archive is still small enough to make the test cheap.
The second decision is whether the household wants a cloud or a shared folder. A cloud has accounts, links and a web interface, which is what you need when someone outside the house has to open something. A synced folder has none of that and nothing to keep running. Many families end up with both: one service for files people share outwards, and direct sync between the devices that live here.
Photos deserve their own service and their own budget. A photo library is the one part of a family cloud that grows without anyone deciding to grow it, and the recipes that handle it well are the heaviest things in this catalog. Read the disk estimate on each page as a starting point rather than a total.
Sets
The sum of the minimums the recipes below declare. It is a floor, not a recommendation: leave room for the operating system, backups and growth.
Why it is here: The broadest answer: files, sharing, calendars and document editing for everyone in the house under one account system. It is also the heaviest recipe here — a database, a reverse proxy and 2 GB of RAM before anyone uploads anything.
Why it is here: The photo half done properly: phone backup, deduplication, faces and albums. Budget for it seriously — 6 GB of RAM and 20 GB of disk to start, and the disk only goes one way.
Why it is here: Not a cloud, and worth considering precisely for that: no server holds the master copy and nothing has to be maintained. It fits a family that wants shared folders between known devices rather than accounts and links.
Why it is here: Sync-first storage with libraries and selective sync, which suits a household that lives out of a synced folder rather than a web interface. Note the recipe runs on amd64 only.
Why it is here: A lighter photo library than Immich, with local machine learning for search and faces. A good fit when the collection matters more than mobile backup.