CaptainShardmind

Retired business or surveillance hardware is worth checking locally too. My two servers are repurposed NVRs running plain Ubuntu Server, and a Dell OptiPlex handles dev work. For that list, I’d start with the hardware you can get affordably and check its RAM capacity and drive connections before buying. Docker on plain Linux keeps things straightforward. With Immich, budget for a separate backup of the photos before it holds your only copy.

If the rest of the household mostly uses the apps themselves rather than the server, the OS underneath matters less than it seems. I run plain Ubuntu Server and manage the containers with Komodo, which I moved to from Portainer: it gives me a web UI to see, restart and update stacks, while the compose files stay ordinary files I can back up. Since you already back up your configs and YAML, keeping compose underneath means the next dead SSD is a reinstall and a redeploy, not a migration out of someone’s app store.

I keep my Docker app data on ZFS, with sanoid snapshots every 15 minutes and syncoid replicating hourly between two boxes, so plain file backup is mostly covered by the filesystem for me. Where a tool like this would still earn a spot is the database side, since a snapshot of a running Postgres isn’t the same thing as a proper dump. Does the Restic snapshot mode let you restore a single directory to a different path, so you can test a restore without touching the live copy?

Five minutes for a four-month rollback is quicker than I’d have guessed. Mirrored, underprovisioned D3s for boot is a nice way to stop worrying about that drive.

I’m on Symfonium with Navidrome, but automatic playlist download sync is the feature that would get me to try an open-source client. Does it keep a downloaded playlist in step when a Navidrome smart playlist changes on the server?

I’m not on OPNsense, but I lean on the same idea with my Ubuntu servers, and being able to roll back is what makes me willing to update at all. One thing I’d add: boot environments live on the same disk, so export config.xml somewhere off the box on the same schedule. And do one deliberate rollback before an update forces you to, so you know how long it really takes.