Obsidian or Logseq.

I’ve used Logseq for my lab journal, thoughts, and whatsoever, and it works excellent for that.

• You can link different things/ dates with each entry
• Markdown
• Functions and querys
• Local
• Very flexible
• And you can find pretty much every thought you’ve ever had by pinpointing it

It can be tricky tho if you want to collaborate, because the sync isn’t perfect yet, but the devs are working really hard on it

I can still recommend you Logseq and Obsidian.

They store their database mostly as plain markdown, so you can just use your sync app of choice (Nextcloud, Syncthing, etc.) to sync everything between devices.

Maybe Logseq offers their sync as self hostable service too, I don’t know.

I find Logseq extremely awesome and would recommend it to you.

I chose to continue with my current setup until I get the time and motivation to upgrade.

I will build a new server from scratch. For that, I bought an used mainboard for a few bucks, which has 6 SATA slots.

Logseq! Right now, you can only self host the database and sync it with Syncthing for example, but the dedicated sync feature is currently in beta and will be self hostable afaik.

Grocy is exactly what you asked for.

I never had any (major) problems with Nextcloud yet.

I just have following “conflicts” with it:

• It doesn’t follow the “Do one thing, and do it right”-philosophy. It tries to do everything at once. File upload/ sharing, media management (NC Photos), RSS, mail, calendar, contacts, and much, much more. I mean, it’s damn convenient and works pretty fine, but nothing is great. For example, Immich/ Photoprism is way better than NC for photo management.
• There’s a lot of abandonware, or buggy/ unmaintained apps. For example, my “News”-feed looks completely broken for months now.
• The performance isn’t good. I mean, the “server” (an old thin client) isn’t fast at all, but the loading times and responsiveness is just awful. The file upload also takes ages, even from the same network.
• It feels bloated. I think, if I would be more into selfhosting and had more time, I would search for alternatives and split all the NC features I use into their own services, e.g. one for file upload, one for document management, one for managing my photos, an own RSS client, and more.

But, as I said, the ease of use and amount of features is still great. I don’t want to spend three weekends just troubleshooting my server and searching for/ installing dozens of individial services. And for that, it’s good enough.

If you have a spare laptop/ PC, I insist you to try Nextcloud.

It’s super easy to install, you actually just download the Docker all-in-one container and it runs in less than 10 minutes. You don’t have much to loose.
I’m relatively happy with it.

I mean, to be fair, NC isn’t perfect. It sometimes feels a bit wonky and tries to do everything, while exceeding at nothing.
But it’s damn comfortable to set up and maintain.

It doesn’t perfectly cover your use case, but everything else (individual services, including web server, database, etc.) is less centralised and more complicated to set up.
Since NC AIO is inside a container, all data are too. It’s a relatively straightforward file system afaik.
Backup also is included, but you have to do it manually by default and it stops the services while doing it.

For offloading large files, you might look into 3rd party tools. NC is basically a remote drive you can connect to with most programs that support it.