Personally I would avoid rasperries like the plague here - they have many downsides when booting up rarely. I’d rather use a Mini PC or ZimaBoard, maybe a build on a MC12 leo (if you can still get it cheap),chuck it all in a cheap case and be good. Unless you have something with IPMI on it I would also invest in a semi professional KVM like PiKVM,JetKVM,NankKVM - and if you can’t stop/start power with that due to the device not following the standards maybe an IP switchable plug.

We are talking about a hobbyist here - if you want to have precautions against all these points OP would need to have a redundant PSU, redundant power sources with automatic failover, backup power,etc. Of course paired with redundant data connections, redundant KVM solutions, physical access management, etc.

In other words: A freaking data center.

Sure, PSUs break. Happens. But very very rarely. And everything else that is on the side of his backup device can be handled through a KVM. And tbh, if that one fails, one can usually direct a “non IT user” to simply pull the plug and put it back on.

In theory that is solvable by a PiKVM,JetKVM,nankKVM, etc.

Yep.

Absolutely the best advice.

I always recommend the same:

1. Get a secure proper cloud storage (Backblaze, Hetzner Object Storage/Storage box, Ionos,etc.) for daily/incremental backups and single file recovery. (As Tandberg is no longer an alternative this seems to be the only choice atm). Make sure you have encryption on and a proper rotation/deletion schedule.

2. Get an external harddrive for a full backup every few weeks/months, preferably store it offsite, even better if you get two and rotate them offsite.

3. Get a M-DISC Burner for the important files. Burn them onto BlueRay M Discs and store these at various offsite locations as well. Do so every few months. These have the advantage of being WORM (write once, read many).

Tapes are fucking expensive for current models and the old LTO drives one can get off Ebay,etc. tend to write faulty data and are almost always end of life. And as LTO is not backwards compatible beyond the generation below it’s very much a possibility that people will have issues reading their tapes in 5 or 10 years.

Just another thing: Get proper,WORM(write once read many) backups. Get a M-Disc capable blueray burner (around 100 bucks) and burn the real important stuff in Archive capable Bluerays (normal ones degrade within years,these don’t). You don’t want to find out your datasets suffered from bit rot(yes,that is a thing) 5 years later and have no option to restore because you fucked up backups 2 years ago. For the real important data(everything that can’t be redownloaded aka the personal stuff) it’s worth it.

Ideally do put some of those discs somewhere else,away from your house.

But for gods sake use proper backups. The tendency for immich to break things is the reason I nowadays recommend photoprism to people who start with selfhosting - it’s worse in a lot of ways but way more stable most of the times.

You don’t need many “guides”, especially not on blogs. They are risky - often written by people who don’t really know what they are doing fully and,more importantly, don’t update their guides. Then things can become really really ugly fast.

If you managed to run jellyfin on a miniPC on Debian you are already doing a good job and very likely already quite a bit.

My personal recommendation: Get another miniPC (no ARM,so no Raspi) and put Debian on it. Then use the Proxmox Community scripts to expand your reach, BUT use them as an “understanding how shit works” base - they have their limitations and their quality has sadly dropped since tteck is no longer with us. (RIP :(

That should give you a pretty good insight into virtualisation, KVM, basic networking - and a plattform to play that you easily can revert to an earlier state if you fuck up.

Remember backups, remember documentation (a wiki,maybe netbox) and monitoring (Prometheus/Grafana or Zabbix are some of the multiple options).

If you want to, you can also look into bash scripts to automate a few things. I know people here hate LLMs but actually ChatGPT and perplexity are good for that. Let them write a bash script for some easy tasks (e.g. update the VM, download a configuration file, create two admin users, make them sudo, install zabbix agent, install this and that) and then let them explain step by step to you. They aren’t too bad at it and actually help you learn basic scripting fairly well. (And then learn it properly with a e-course or something.)

As long as you don’t operate any public facing services and proper backups the actual risk involved is fairly small

Yeah. Would be my recommendation, too. For the size of the lab a Zimba seems a good choice if something new is what OP wants, otherwise a MiniPC.

Same for me, I just knew it because I stumbled across it recently.

Well,tbf, AMD is at least a little bit better than Intel. They are even worse.

I fucking want proper, block based naming back

Tbh, as someone who just built their own system I am a little bit angry that they didn’t announce it a few months earlier - I would have waited a bit longer then to see their pricing.

The specs are solid for a “Proxmox NAS with ZFS and containers”. For a regular NAS it’s oversized,but we all know that. The trend towards integrated devices is there and I went down that way as well.(And if you can actually install a different OS of course)

Anyway: If they can deliver what they promise it might be one of the most interesting systems - it doesn’t have many of the issues the Ugreens have (lack of ECC,etc.) and if they manage to deliver… it’s pushing into a space a lot of prosumers and small companies are that is currently only covered by self builds or spending much more money than necessary.

They list the AI 9 Hx Pro 370 which does support ECC.

Bitwarden is absolutely solid,yes.

Local server wise: If OP uses it in a local only setup behind a proper VPN implementation from my point of view the risk is acceptable. It’s not that hard to secure a home server in a way that Vaultwarden is not at risk - and when you’re so compromised that it is, then the attacker can easily use other vectors to gain the same data (RAt,keyloggers, etc.)

mam?

I would love to see a replacement that supports Anna’s Archive.

Old PCs often have that problem. My “NAS” is more a full on proxmox server with an AM5 CPU, 64GB ECC and yet it halved my power consumption compared to its predecessors.

Easiest way is to use a tasmota based power plug. They need to calibrated once,but then are pretty reliable and can be found for 15 bucks.

Nous A1T (or similar nous,but watch out for the T at the end, Z is zigbee) is popular in central europe. They are well built and cheap as fuck. But again,they need to be calibrated once which you need a steady user (e.g an old incandescent light bulb ) and a multimeter for… It’s easy and only needs to be done once.

Another option are the Inter-Tech PDUs, they costs around a 100 Bucks, are fully IP, can switch channels but only measure the consumption of the whole strip. If you have a more advanced USV they often have a total power consumption measurement.

If you want to go all in you need to look for “switched and metered” PDUs, but they are fucking expensive. The Cyberpower PDU81005 is the cheapest “good” one and is over 400 bucks here . So… Most people won’t do that,even in a professional setting.

Yeah,the most open source solutions atm. Sadly development slowed down a bit.

Just a few considerations:

• For a 12 bay NAS I would strongly consider ZFS - which makes ECC more or less a must.

• Mainboard wise the CWK AMD Board is worth a consideration, and so is the Asrock Live Mixer B850 if you want ECC on AMD5

• A popular build option is using a cheap used or “Chinese” host-build controller as SATA ports are hard to get these days.

• I would personally look at using Proxmox and then TrueNAS as an NAS OS and simply passthrough the HBA.

• Another alternative would be using a Zimbra Board and use their expansion options - but that comes with downsides in terms of CPU power and no ECC.

• For Plex it might be favourable to use a CPU with a built-in GPU for transcoding. Intel is slightly better here, but has other downsides, especially if you want ECC

• Get a Geekworm PiKvm, a original PiKVM, a NanoPi oder JetKVM…or something like that. it’s worth it.

• If you don’t feel like self-building anymore have a look at the Ugreen. They come without the “only approved HDDs” Synology bullshit, allow you to install your own OS and are fairly capable. But sadly they do not support ECC. (And they aren’t really cheaper than self building at least not in central Europe.)

• Self building is absolutely possible and we are here to help you.

This plus technitium DNS is exactly my approach.

Damn,yeah …it was late…