All of your issues can be solved by a backup. My host went out of business. I set up a new server, pulled my backups, and was up and running in less than an hour.

I’d recommend docker compose. Each service gets its own folder inside your docker folder. All volumes are a folder in the services folder. Each night, run a script that stops all of them, starts duplicati, backs up to a remote server or webdav share or whatever, and then starts them back up again. If you want to be extra safe, back up to two locations. It’s not that complicated if it’s just your own services.

Don’t over think it, start small, a home server. Then add stuff, you will see that it’s not that crazy.

I personally have just one home server that locally creates encrypted backups and uploads them to backblaze.

This gives me the privacy I need as everything is on my server that I own while also having the backups on a big reliable company.

It’s not perfect but it fits my threat model

Right now I just play with things at a level that I don’t care if they pop out of existence tomorrow.

If you want to be truly safe (at an individual level, not an institutional level where there’s someone with an interest in fucking your stuff up), you need to make sure things are recoverable unless 3 completely separate things go wrong at the same time (an outage at a remote data centre, your server fails and your local backup fails). Very unlikely for all 3 to happen simultaneously, but 1 is likely to fail and 2 is forseeable, so you can fix it before the 3rd also fails.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

15 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 3 acronyms.

[Thread #821 for this sub, first seen 21st Jun 2024, 17:05] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

Absurdly safe.

Proxmox cluster, HA active. Ceph for live data. Truenas for long term/slow data.

About 600 pounds of batteries at the bottom of the rack to weather short power outages (up to 5 hours). 2 dedicated breakers on different phases of power.

Dual/stacked switches with lacp’d connections that must be on both switches (one switch dies? Who cares). Dual firewalls with Carp ACTIVE/ACTIVE connection…

Basically everything is as redundant as it can be aside from one power source into the house… and one internet connection into the house. My “single point of failures” are all outside of my hands… and are all mitigated/risk assessed down.

I do not use cloud anything… to put even 1/10th of my shit onto the cloud it’s thousands a month.

TrueNAS scale helps a lot, as it makes many popular apps just a few clicks away. Or for more power-users, stuff like the linux cockpit also really helps.

To directly answer your questions…

• In the event of DB corruption (which hasn’t happened to me yet) I would probably rollback that app to the previous snapshot. I suspect that TrueNAS having ZFS as an underlayment may help in this regard, as it actually detects bitrot and bitflips, which may be the underlying cause of such corruption.
• In the case where a device breaks… if it’s a hard drive that broke, I just pop in a new one and add it to the degraded mirror set. If it’s “something else” that broke, my plan is to pop one of the mirror shards into a spare PoS computer (as truenas scale runs on common x86 hardware) and deal with the ugly-factor until I repair or replace the bigger issue.
• The only way to defend against a cloud provider is replication, so plan accordingly if that is a concern.
• If by “sync’d confidentially” you mean encrypted in transit, I’m pretty sure that TrueNAS has built in replication over SSH. If you meant TNO, then you probably want to build your setup over a cryfs filesystem so no cleartext bits hit the cloud, although on second thought… it’s not really meant for multi-master synchronization… my case just happens to fit it (only one device writes)… so there is probably a better choice for this.
• Setup is a hassle? Yes… just be sure that you invest that hassle into something permanent, if not something like a TrueNAS configuration (where the config gets carried along for the ride with the data) then maybe something like ansible scripts (which is machine-readable documentation). Depending on your organization skills, even hand-written notes or making your own “meta” software packages (with only dependencies & install scripts) might work. What you don’t want to do is manually tweak a linux install, and then forget what is “special” about that server or what is relying on it.
• How safe is my setup? Depends… I still need to start rotating a mirror shard as an offsite backup, so not very robust against a site disaster; Security-wise… I’ve got a lot of private bits, and it works for my needs… as far as I know :)
• Still enthusiastic? I try to see everything as both temporary and a work-in-progress. This can be good in ways because nothing has to be perfect, but can be bad in ways that my setup at any given time is an ugly amalgamation of different experimental ideas that may or may not survive the next “iteration”. For example, I still have centos 7 & python 2 stuff that needs to be migrated or obsoleted.

My incredible hatred and rage for not understanding things powers me on the cycle of trying and failing hundreds of times till I figure it out. Then I screw it all up somehow and the cycle begins again.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Yeah. It is kinda hard.

Backups. First and foremost.

Now once that is sorted, what if your DB gets corrupted. You test your backups

Learn how to verify and restore

It is a hassle. That’s why there is a constant back and forth between on prem and cloud in the enterprise

First of all ignore the trends. Fuck docker, fuck nixos, fuck terraform or whatever tech stack gets shilled constantly.

Find a tech stack that is easy FOR YOU and settle on that. I haven’t changed technologies for 4 years now and feel like everything can fit in my head.

Second of all, look at the other people using commercial services and see how stressed they are. Google banned my account, youtube has ads all the time, the app for service X changed and it’s unusable and so on.

Nothing comes for free in terms of time and mental baggage