Your old Mac/PC is your new home cloud - Done in less than 20 mins

So, I recently did a video on the whole idea of self-hosting, hosting your own things so that you can cancel some of your subscriptions, things like photo backup, file backup, things like that. However, the device that I covered in that video is quite pricey. So, I just thought to myself, hey, you can have a lot of the same experience by using an old Mac that you might already have. So, if you have a Mac Mini or maybe you bought a new Mac Mini or you have an old MacBook Air like this one that I have here, you can use it to basically get a lot of the same experience, but you are missing out on a few other things because of course with a device like the Umbrell Pro. It's housed in one unit. It has a dedicated Ethernet port and it also has four upgradeable MVME slots, which let's be honest, we're not going to get that anytime soon on any of these Mac devices. What I really liked about that device though was the OS, Umbrell OS. So, you can get other cheaper devices like the Umbrell Pro the device they have, but they won't have as many features of functionality. But it's the OS I think that actually matters a lot because I think that when you have an OS that looks great, it's easy to use and easy to set up and just get going. It can really make a difference on self-hosting and make it a lot easier and more accessible to a lot more people. And the great thing about Umbrell OS is that you can install it on older machines or just a Mac that you have laying around that you're not using. You can set it up so that you almost have your own self-hosting server sort of thing, but it's on your Mac instead. So, the first thing we need to do is install Docker Desktop for Mac. So, Docker is like the best way I can explain it, it's like a virtual machine or an OS on top of your Mac OS. So, the great thing is we are going to leave Mac OS as it is. We're not going to mess around with anything like that. you're still going to have Mac OS. Docker is just like a a thing that can run other things basically. And we're going to install Umbrella OS on Docker. We first need to get the Docker Desktop, which I'll leave a link to in the description. And yeah, they just have a quick guide here on how to install Docker Desktop on the Mac. But the first thing we're going to do is we're actually going to install Rosetta. So, we can see here we have a command for software update install Rosetta. Let's copy that. Then we're going to go to terminal. Open that up like so. I feel like the terminal could be quite scary for most people, but all we're going to do is we're going to paste in that command, hit enter. Then it's going to ask us to type a and then press enter again. So, now that we have that installed, we're going to then download the Docker desktop. Now, we need to make sure we download the correct one. We're going to download the Apple silicon one because I have I can't remember what chip I have in here, but I have an M chip in here. So, let's download that. Cool. We're downloaded. We're going to open it, and then we're just going to drag our Docker app to the applications like so. Let it copy over. 2 and a half gig. Should take less than a minute as it says. Cool. Now we've got it installed. We're going to go to our applications. So I'm actually just going to search for it. I'm going to search for it like so. Docker. Open it up. Yep. Accept the service agreement. Use recommended settings. Let's just go with that. Background items detected. Yes. Allow. Cool. We've also got a command thing here. So let's install that. We want to make sure that we install the Python whatever it is package. Well, it's saying it's going to take 58 hours. It definitely is not going to take 58 hours. We have the Python package installed now. And now we have our Docker desktop app. Uh let's search for Umbrell in the search bar. Uh let's pull that. Uh it is in there. Containers. Is it in the containers? Images. Here we go. And then if we run it, run, we have this issue, right? So I was having an issue trying to install Docker from the desktop app. So when I search for Umbrella in here and I tried to install it, yeah, it just kind of just didn't want to work really. So I was asking Claude how to troubleshoot and it just gave me this command here to run in the terminal, which is what we're going to do. So, we're going to open up the terminal and we're going to paste that command in. Boom. And it looks like we should be ready to go. So, once we go to containers, yep, we can see it running there. And we have Umbreel OS running perfectly. Now, we just need to set up Umbrell OS. So, we're just going to make our account. So, this is the account that's actually going to be on Umbreal. This isn't like going online or anything like that. This is local to your machine. It's just creating a password gateway so that not everyone can just access your Umbrell on the network. So, we're just going to make an account very quickly. Create account. Cool. Umbrell OS is now ready. Next. And we are running. Like it's as simple as that. It literally takes less than 5 minutes. And now I have Umbrell OS running on my Mac. And the great thing is now I can install apps. So they recommend some apps that you can get going with straight away. Nexcloud is basically like a Google Drive or Dropbox alternative. Image is like a iCloud alternative where you can use it to back up photos and things like that from your iPhone or from your iPad or whatever and it will sync. Home Assistant is a good way to run all of your smart devices in your home in one sort of network. So let's just say you have Philips Hue lights and then you also have Go View lights but you want them to sort of work together, run automations and stuff. You can do that all through Home Assistant. You can also install Plex. So, if you want to host your own movies and TV shows, maybe you're sick of paying for Netflix, you can use Plex to do something like that or Jellyfin. There's so many different options here. But what I really like most is the OS. Like, just look how nice it looks. It looks like it could be a Mac OS. We can actually make this full screen like so. And now we pretty much have our own OS on top of an OS. And it works really, really well. Has the nice dock at the bottom which you can use to access things very quickly. So, we can see our live usage, how much memory I have, how much storage I have. We can see our settings and mess around with any settings that we need to in here. We can go to the app store and we can install any of the apps that Umbrell OS sort of has access to. And there are a ton here. You can pretty much find any app for anything and everything. So, it's really powerful how well umbrell OS looks and works. You can install OpenClaw. So, Open Claw right now is obviously very, very popular. You can install it and have it run on your Mac. You can install tail scale. So tail scale for those who don't really understand what it actually is. It's the idea of being able to access your umbrella OS, your your Mac from a network that's outside of your home. So let's just say you're traveling, you're at a hotel or whatever and you're trying to access your files. You would use T scale to do that and it does it in a secure manner. There's actually so much here. There's so many apps that I didn't even know you could use on this. Like it's crazy. You can even install your own like um AI agents and stuff, AI languages. Image is a really good one. If you're someone who wants to back up your photos and stuff from your iPhone, but you don't want to use iCloud, you want to have it on your own hard drive. You can use image to do something like this. However, I still do recommend using some sort of cloud storage solution or having multiple backups in different locations because obviously photos and videos, they're usually very valuable memories that you don't want to lose. And if you were to lose access to your Mac, maybe it breaks, maybe it catches fire or something like that. Yeah, you're going to lose all those photos and videos, you got to hope that you still have them on your iPhone. This is why this whole idea of a sort of 321 backup is very popular. The idea is that you have three different copies on two different devices in some way and then you have one of those devices in a different location. So, worst comes to worse, like you have a sort of copy of your data, of your information. Now, you can actually take this a step further and connect an external drive like this to expand the storage because of course you are limited by the storage on a Mac Mini or a MacBook Air, especially with a MacBook Air unless you spent the crazy amounts of money that Apple required to upgrade the uh the storage on them. Yeah, like you're most likely going to need something like this. And you don't actually have to use an external SSD like this. You can get a big old hard drive bay which has like six drives in it. Set it up as a RAID setup and then use that to have a ton of storage and then put the Mac and the hard drive bay somewhere in a cupboard somewhere and just leave it and access all of your files that way. I'm not going to show exactly how to set that up because it is a bit more technical. But the idea is then you basically have your own server at home and you can self-host a ton of different things and use it almost like your own sort of home cloud network sort of thing. And also, I do want to make clear, you do not have to use Umbrella OS. You can use whatever OS you like. I think there's like Kasa OS as well, and there's some other ones. The only reason I chose Umbrella OS is because I like the look of it. I like the way it works and everything. I love how it has an app store, so you can easily install apps and stuff. It almost looks like if Apple were to make their own sort of self-hosting OS sort of thing, this is what it would look like. So, this is why I like to use it. So yeah, that is one of the easiest ways to use an old Mac and have your own sort of self-hosting sort of thing going on. Hopefully you guys enjoyed it. Follow me on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe for more.