I used to backup to external drives. Now I use bare ones since finding big externals got difficult.
I use (and probably abuse) docker compose. K8s is great but compose is easier.
I use a single makefile. Kinda ugly but it's fine.
Bunch of friends and family use my "services". They usually chip in for hard drives and stuff.
I have a few central points of failure but it keeps things easy. My uptime still beats most big clouds - though I have it easier.
I accidentally took down my server for a few days from a botched hardware install. It's a bit funny because now we realize how critical the home server has become to us.. on the other hand, already got the spouses blessing to build a backup standby server.
I've recently started running unraid at home on an old desktop PC and it's really nice. I've also migrated my unifi controller, plex server and pihole to it and it's very easy. Way nicer than the previous setup where I had random dedicated devices each needing their own type of maintenance (unifi controller on my gaming pc needed me to download/install updates manually, plex server hardly received any updates running on old windows laptop and I was always worried about breaking it, and I almost never looked at the pihole running on a rpi).
Now I have a single dashboard and can upgrade each container with a single click, and everything stays on the happy path.
I used to backup to external drives. Now I use bare ones since finding big externals got difficult.
I use (and probably abuse) docker compose. K8s is great but compose is easier.
I use a single makefile. Kinda ugly but it's fine.
Bunch of friends and family use my "services". They usually chip in for hard drives and stuff.
I have a few central points of failure but it keeps things easy. My uptime still beats most big clouds - though I have it easier.
I accidentally took down my server for a few days from a botched hardware install. It's a bit funny because now we realize how critical the home server has become to us.. on the other hand, already got the spouses blessing to build a backup standby server.