Why#
Part I ended with a working stack. Six services running behind a reverse proxy, backups going off-site every night, monitoring in place, family data safe.
That was the easy part.
Part I had a clear definition of done: is the service running, is it secure, does it back up. Part II does not have that luxury. The question it asks is harder: does this actually work for the people who are supposed to use it? Does it replace what it was meant to replace? Can you trust it enough to delete the originals?
These are not technical questions. They are questions about use, about habit, about whether the infrastructure you built has earned its place in daily life.
Part II is where a homelab either becomes a home — or stays a project.
Family#
Part I was invisible to everyone else. Services went up, data moved, things got more secure. Nothing changed from the outside.
Part II is where that changes. Photos — nearly half a terabyte of them, from phones and laptops and old drives going back years — need to move out of Google and into a system we control. Documents need a permanent home. Financial data needs a place to live that is not a spreadsheet.
None of this happens automatically. And none of it happens until the system has proven it can be trusted — not just technically, but practically. The photo migration will not start until the tools have been tested. The originals will not be deleted until the replacement has been used for weeks. Every step has a deliberate waiting period built in.
The family is not part of this phase yet. That is intentional. Part II is about making the stack work for one person before asking others to depend on it.
Tech#
Part II started on the 11th of May with a roadmap of four workstreams. By the 16th it had nine.
That is not a failure of planning. It is what happens when you move from building to operating. The first week surfaced things that were invisible while construction was the focus: a security tool watching the wrong addresses, a log pipeline silently discarding everything, a container tunnel tool that had never had its identity provider properly connected. Each one was individually small. Together they formed a clear picture of the gap between a stack that runs and a stack that is ready.
The nine workstreams that emerged cover the ground that actually needs covering:
Replacing the last external dependency in the network layer — the commercial tunnel service that routes all external traffic — with infrastructure running on a server in Europe under direct control. This is the piece that closes the gap between “mostly sovereign” and “actually sovereign.”
Moving photos, documents, and files from commercial cloud storage to self-hosted alternatives. Not as a statement, but because the alternatives are now good enough and the commercial services charge more every year for data that is fundamentally yours.
Building the financial layer — dashboards over real bank data, not estimates. The kind of overview that used to require expensive software or a financial advisor.
Getting the operational foundation right: monitoring that actually alerts, backups that are actually tested, security scanning that actually reports. The work that is invisible when it works and catastrophic when it does not.
And a public surface — notes, reflections, documentation — because building something this carefully and keeping it entirely private would be a waste.
The roadmap restructured itself three times in the first week. That is the correct behavior for a plan that is being tested against reality.
Project#
Part II has one exit criterion that matters more than the others: trust.
Not technical correctness. Not feature completeness. The specific condition is this: does the person running this stack trust it enough to explain it to someone else?
That is a higher bar than it sounds. It requires that the monitoring is honest, that the backups have been verified, that the operational procedures exist in writing and not just in memory. It requires that nothing important is silently failing.
Part I proved the stack could be built. Part II proves it can be lived in.