bluGill

How small? I bought a N100 system from Protectli which I’m happy with. It should work better than a pi according to the specs - but I never tried a pi so I can’t say if it really is. However this is bigger than a pi. I have an old system76 Meerkat, which is much smaller (I think this is the NUC form factor?), but my system is 8 years old and so not really comparable to anything modern, but that is an option.

Depends on what is inside, intel N100 or better CPUS are considered really good in general. There are some bad CPUs in mini-PCs though. Make sure the hardware has drivers for your choosen OS, not everything supports linux [well] even today. And every once in a while someone makes a PC with bad design and so it doesn’t work well for technical reasons.

There are a lot of small PCs that are low power that will work well. I haven’t used GMKTech’s, and one look at their website says I won’t try to navigate that mess. (why does everyone need a subscribe to our newsletter popup blocking my ability to see anything - I avoid anyone who abuses me like that)

Validating restore is one of the harder things. There are some people who restore means it works on the exact same hardware - commonly hardware vendors will change internal details without changing model numbers so this plan often fails when it turns out the computer restore to is slightly different and so you don’t have the right driver on your backup (My dad used to repair computers for people who did this - he often charged thousands of dollars to fix a 10-30 year old machine that a new PC could run circles around. IIRC most of the machines were HPUX and not PCs so the cost of porting to a new machine was ). Most people figure they will be replacing the computer with something newer and so instead install the latest OS and then restore just files, now you face the question of do you restore applications or not?

I would test restore on a cheap raspberry-pi, assuming the backup is from x86, or on a cheap ebay x86 if the backup is from ARM. For most self hosted people this is really what they want to know can be done because they don’t know what the replacement hardware will be. The goal here isn’t a usable system, it is enough that you can show your files still exist.

Well for sure that is better than nothing, so since you have it keep doing it until/unless you have something better.

Your next task is to make sure you can restore the data. Since the data is - probably - saved, you have good odds. Practice restoring means that when a computer breaks you will faster be able to get the replacement running again. Practice also means in the off chance something isn’t saved you find out about it while your old computer is still running.

Then we need to think about threats.

Ransomware that encrypts your disk will encrypt that shared drive too. I don’t know what unraid offers, but you should enable read-only snapshots (now practice restoring them!), and save those snapshots. Ideally you want some pattern like all backups for a week, then 1 backup a week for a month, then 1 backup a month for a year, and 1 backup a year for the next 7 years. This way you can just go back to before the ransomware and restore from backups.

You might delete one file on accident. You are likely not to realize it for a while. One more reason for the pattern saved above. Make sure you can restore individual files.

Your house might burn down destroying all computers. You want a copy of all that data someplace else, maybe more than one someplace elses. Though perhaps you only want a yearly and weekly copy. If the data is encrypted (very good idea for off site!) make sure the key is saved someplace else secure where you can find it - a key you can remember is a bad key so thought about how to save the key is important.

You might die or become mentally disabled with important files that your heirs need. Pictures, wills, tax/bank data (including passwords!). document the above well enough that someone else can at least figure it out. Ideally you would know someone unrelated to you into computers and leave them a lot of money ($5000?) to figure out your system and get your heirs the important files after you die. (this should be a great business opportunity, but odds are not enough people will pay for it)

There are a lot of variations I didn’t think of, but I think I covered enough to start you out. You get to decide how far you go. I’m not far enough myself, but at least I have one backup in my RAID.

One last thought - you might have some data you don’t want backed up. If you delete the evidence of your crime but the backups are there they can get you. Your secret porn collection might be legal, but still not something you want your heirs to find out about, maybe keep it in a different way? Your call here.

Jellyfin is on his nas which we assume has more power.

streaming what? Streaming one mp3s. Streaming a dozen different video re-encoded to something else probably can’t be done any affordable machine.

Maybe. How much does it use when you use it? For lightly used servers idle power matters. However a modern CPU often uses much less power to get the same amount of work done and so if the server is doing something idle consumption isn’t important.

There are many options. the money you send braodcomm would make the option source options really good in not long. But that means a vision and investment for the future.

Self hosting will always remain a hobby thing. Most people won’t give the time need to properly admin their own system and an improperly admined system is a risk that you don’t want to take with your precious data. I can’t blame people for not doing this - there are ball games to watch, saw dust to make, kids to raise, and millions of other things to do with your free time such that you cannot do everything you might want to. Sure most people could learn to do this, but it isn’t a good use of their time.

What the world needs is someone trustworthy and cheap enough to handle data for people who have better things to do. Which is why I have fastmail handle my email. I self host a lot of other things though because I don’t know of anyone I can trust to do a good job for a reasonable price.

Ubuntu has gone downhill a lot in the last decade. I no longer can recommend it. Yes there is a large community, but they make too many questionable decisions and so doing anything “different” will be hard.

You can run docker in docker. I do that all the time (but via scripts so I know it does docker in docker, but I don’t know how they do that).

But again, I wasn’t even trying to run HA in docker, I was running in a VM container and still the above is refused by default.

Maybe, but the documentation says it can’t be done.

note too that I wasn’t running docker but instead a vm.

https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/ Home assistant container - the version for docker - doesn’t support add-ons. If you go through a lot of effort you can make it work, but you won’t get help. (easiest is to install some linux in the docker and then home assistant supervised on top of that)

There is no reason HAOS couldn’t run just fine in a container (qemu not docker), but they intentionally detect that and break it (I tried, I probably could make it work but I don’t have that much time)

Home Assistant insists that it must run on bare metal hardware and will not work well. This is a purely artificial limitation that home assistant puts on you. You can work around it with a lot of effort, or the limitations might not matter to you, but it is a limit to be aware of. I personally went to OpenHAB instead, but YMMV.

Since you have Proxmox why would you switch? If you don’t like it, then by all means, there are lots of other options. However there is a good reason Proxmox comes up a lot. (I don’t personally use Proxmox so I don’t know those reasons, but the people who recommend it give every indication they are smart people who understand the problem and so I trust them enough to say it is a good option)

Best is a subjective question. There is no objective way to say what is best. We can argue about pros and cons. We can argue about what we prefer. However that is all subjective and there is no one best answer.

Ann reason you choose authenik? There are a nmber of options and I’m not sure why to choose one over the other.

Pi’s built in audio is terrible. Even if it works you will want a better audio interface. The PI only has digital inputs (I think there is a mic input), so you need something to get audio in. If you can get the digital audio that is best, but often that is behind encryption and so you end up with analog inputs. (I’m not sure what the options here are, worth looking deeper).

Once you have the audio in, there are a number of Jack (which port audio supports) to network low latency products that will work. Configuration will be hard but that is something you only do once. (configuration is hard because almost everyone who uses this wants a different complex setup and so there is no way to make it easy in a way that would help anyone else)

I was thinking about restoring the backup in a temporary location and running diff on random files to check the files match the source, but I don’t know if this is redundant now.

That isn’t as useful as you would think. If your computer fails there are high odds you will restore to a fresh install of a newer OS and newer software/services versions. Which means that you really want/need to also test data/config migration.

OTOH, if you have backups odds are the data is there even if you never tested them. Testing you can restore is mostly about do you have everything backed up. Your backups can pass all the validation but if you accidentally configured them to only backup /tmp (or something else worthless) you may as well not have backups. Thus you should test that you can do a full restore just to make sure that the data you want is all there. I generally trust that backup software can restore all the data you pointed it at without problems even if you didn’t test them - but I don’t trust that you (or I) configured them to backup the right things.

most of the work is getting media. I spend many hours ripping cds, getting track titles right (popular music this is automatic but I have a lot of obscure cds where this can’t be done). there are ways to download music, but again you will spend time doing that.

movies are even worse in part because there often isn’t a legal way to do things and so even if you have the rare legal movie things are tricky.

Back in the 70’s my dad worked for controll data - I think when Cray still worked for them. One day uniforned military came to the lab he was in with a failed haredrived handcuffed to them (i’m guessing this would have been a 14 inch drive?). They watched while the lab opened the drive to find physically warped platters, then used rags to wipe the oxide off, took the rags tothe parking lot and burned them.

not sure how practical that is for you but it was once the standard to be sure.