In this video I’m setting up Diskover, which I was honestly surprised to find because it’s basically the thing I’ve been looking for for years: a way to take an unstructured pile of files and turn it into something you can actually analyze. Diskover pulls file stats into Elasticsearch so you can query it and get real answers like “what are my largest files,” “how many files are in this directory,” and “how old is this data.” If you’ve got a NAS you’ve been dumping files into for 10+ years and you’re staring at it like “what do I even clean up,” this is the kind of tool that makes that problem manageable. I walk through how I spin up a dedicated VM in my homelab the same way I do most things: DNS entry, update my Ansible inventory, then run an AWX workflow to provision a Proxmox VM with Docker/Docker Compose and Nginx. Then I use the linuxserver Diskover container stack (Diskover + Elasticsearch + helper), tweak the port to 8080 so it doesn’t fight Nginx, and mount the path I want to scan. I also hit the real-world gotcha: Elasticsearch needs RAM—my first run crashed until I bumped the VM to 4GB. After that, I kick off a manual crawl job, select the new index in the UI, and show the dashboards that make it way easier than re-running du/df commands forever.