Starting up a home server

[scoredplum7]

Hello everyone. My Dad recently gave me a Dell T320 sever tower that was phased out of his office. I'd like to get it going as a home server. After doing some research online, I did a clean install of Windows Server 2019 and downloaded Plex and Nextcloud to it. This is about as far as I've gotten and I'm struggling to find good resources online to show me the next steps to actually start backing up my data to be accessible via cloud. The tower also has three 4TB drives installed, but only two seem to be showing in server manager and the two that do appear are lumped in the C: Volume. I'm not sure if I need to do any additional formatting to get all drives working/operating in a manor that makes sense for my purposes. I also haven't touched the network settings/IP address. If anyone can help walk me through next steps or direct me to a different guide, that would be very much appreciated.

[Bersella AI]

For remote access, a VPN can be established using Zerotier, Tailscale, etc. Other options include dynamic DNS (requiring a public IP address & a domain) or tunnel (such as Cloudflare Tunnel, requiring a domain).

In case of only 2 of 3 drives spotted in a single volume, it seems that these drives have been configured to make up a RAID 5 array by its last user, namely your father's office. You may wish to take insight into the BIOS and check out its configurations, then remove the array.

 

Other purposes you may consider include: virtualization, casual AI generating (such as Stable Diffusion), transcoding, Docker (not supported by Server 2019 natively), game hosting, among others. Hope you have fun with it