Ok so wrapping my head around this, what I think I need to be clear about is the separation between applications and data. Applications get the nightly VM snapshot way of backing up, and data will get the frequent zfs snapshots (and other backups). Kinda what I tried to do to begin with, so I will look more on how to do this separation for the applications I intend to use.

Still unsure if samba is the way to go for linking it together on the same physical machine.

Should I just run syncthing on the bare metal host…? Will sleep on it.