u/Qurupeco01

Hi! I started the homelabbing journey around 10 months ago with an Optiplex 7080 I got in r/homelabsales, and a bunch of HDDs from a second hand website in my country. Disks are connected through a PCI adapter, powered using a PicoPSU, and all of that is wired to a managed switch that centralizes LAN connections.

Today, my hardware setup is still the same, aside of adding a bit more RAM, but the learning on software stacks and services has been huge! I am running proxmox, and this is the only node I have. Things I am running on this little machine:

- Virtualized TrueNAS with several datasets serving the rest of the apps through NFS
- Gitea server
- Syncthing in TrueNAS to share directories between my machines
- Pi-hole DNS + ad-blocker
- Tailscale router
- Cloudflare tunnel
- 2 development machines I use for job-related stuff (robotics with ROS2)
- Apache guacamole
- PBS backups, + automated laptop backups with borg to the NAS
- A docker VM with dockhand, filebrowser, an outline wiki I share with some colleagues, and a torrent seeding + media stack with jellyfin and *arr.

Next steps are allowing easy airVPN connection to any of my devices (reading about that, idk if it will be through VLANs or some sort of wireguard) + probably moving TrueNAS to a dedicated host for reliability, apart from solving some NIC hang issues I am experiencing sometimes.

My main takeaway is that even with a very low budget and with minimal hardware, you can still learn a lot, while also hosting a lot of services, and that is the most exciting part of this hobby. Racks are amazing, but I don’t feel the need of getting one soon. I still feel there is much more I can do inside this little machine :)

Hi guys, almost 6 months ago I bought a Thinkpad and instantly installed arch + hyprland, and it has been a blast since then! Zero regrets about leaving windows back.

The thing is, as I decided to do everything myself, there are some basic things that I am still lacking: one of them is a good backup strategy.

I configured snapper and it works flawlessly, but I also want a good backup of my system to be done every night in my NAS. For that, I was trying Borg with Borgmatic, but there are some things that i am worried about:

- I configured in /etc/fstab an automount for my NAS dataset, but when offsite, if Tailscale is not active, backup will not be done. also sometimes it is too slow to mount even when trying to open it from file explorer, any good config that makes it mounted when available without me even noticing, and that avoids it blocking any process when it is not available? I dont find the right setup to have zero friction mounts.

- When outside home, should I use the Tailscale IP? Or home IP? I am a bit worried of home IP conflicting with other device in the real network I am connected to.

- Which non-obvious directories should I backup? I have /root /boot /home, /etc, /var (without caches), and /usr/local/bin for my custom scripts. I also created a small script that lists pacman packages installed and active systemd services

- Should I make a small script that wakes up the system before the backup time? Right now, when laptop is suspended, system just doesn’t run the backup.

-With a setup like this, how many time could I expect to have the system back online after a failure? One of my biggest fears with this is doing all the backup for nothing :(

Setup after 10 months into homelabbing

Backup depth and off-site strategy