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The original was posted on /r/selfhosted by /u/guesswhochickenpoo on 2023-12-06 04:40:19.

TL;DR what do you use for documentation / wiki that meets the criteria section below?

Currently I’m using Confluence for our household documentation. At the time I wanted something outside of my self hosted / homelab stuff because I wanted it to be always available for my wife when she needs to access processes and such for our household. I recognize that Confluence and/or the free tire could go away at some point, I generally host my own stuff, and I would prefer something more ‘open’ like plain-text / markdown behind the scenes… if possible.

I could easily host something like wiki.js, or some other option but if our home infra goes down she / we don’t have access to the doc which I don’t like. Plus there is the whole “If I die” thing which is another reason I’m hesitant to self host the doc / wiki.

Criteria (ideally):

  • Always available (which might mean cloud hosted)
  • Simple / portable storage format (Markdown at it’s core would be ideal)
  • Diagram feature built in (bonus, not a hard requirement)
  • Full data ownership
  • No monthly costs

Can’t think of anything that meets all the criteria, there’s always some compromise, which might just be the way it is. For example I could ‘self-host’ otterwiki or wiki.js on a VPS for a pretty small monthly fee, which I could also use for other stuff that doesn’t make sense for a home lab, but then I also need to deal with security since it’s hosted on the internet. Or I could self-host and just accept that there’s risk of it not being available when my wife needs it or if I die suddenly.

I thought Obsidian might do the trick because we can easily share and sync the markdown files behind the scenes but I find Obsidian bloated and not a great mobile experience and I found out recently it’s not open source. iOS notes is pretty limited and locked it the Apple ecosystem with no easy way to migrate.

What is everyone else doing for this?

UPDATE:

This might be the ‘best of both worlds’ solution I was looking for.

TL;DR: Use a self-hosted option but have it export the documentation to a universal format like PDF and send it to a shared Google Drive or iCloud drive or something. No cloud hosting fees or other downsides but it’s still always accessible to her if home lab does down if I’m messing with the lab or I’m flat out dead lol