How to prepare for future home server upgrade?

Submitted ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨jonathan7luke@lemmy.zip⁩ to ⁨selfhosted@lemmy.world⁩

I’ve been self-hosting Home Assistant for over a year, and I want to take the dive into more self-hosting. I want to start by converting an old laptop into a home server. Assuming that goes well, I’ll probably want to upgrade to a more modern, purpose built server and NAS fairly soon. How can I make sure that what I set up on the laptop can be easily moved to my upgraded hardware later?

Additional notes:

I’m already using Tailscale (it’s what prompted me to want to do more self-hosting)
I want to be able to access my server via Tailscale, but I want everything mapped to my own custom domain via a reverse proxy
I’m planning on using Proxmox

Thanks in advance for the advice! :)

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Comments

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tofu@lemmy.nocturnal.garden ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
With Proxmox it’s quite easy, you can copy the VM/LXC Backups to the new host (via SCP, NFS or whatever) and restore there. Recently did exactly that.

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- jonathan7luke@lemmy.zip ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Sounds pretty straightforward. Thanks for the info!
  
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- frongt@lemmy.zip ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  You could even just create a cluster and do a migration. I don’t think you need zfs for that, only replication.
  
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  - tofu@lemmy.nocturnal.garden ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Should work indeed, but they’d need replicated space. I’m not sure how well that works if the cluster is only designed to be temporary, since removing a productive node from a cluster is a bit risky?
    
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Infinite@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
In Home Assistant, navigate to Settings > System > Backups. Configure the backup settings and create a manual backup.

On your new Proxmox server, you can download the qcow2 file from Home Assistant’s website and run it as a virtual machine.

On first boot, you can import your previous configuration from a backup.

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pHr34kY@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
When you upgrade your desktop PC, plan for it to be the home server after that.

I got a rackmount case to transplant my old desktop montherboard into every 5 years. I also got a 4-port NIC so it can also be a router. My server is a 4th gen Core i5 and it’s still plenty of power for a home server.

If you’re a laptop guy, I’m not sure what you’d do.

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Zikeji@programming.dev ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
All my backups are tested, so upgrades (or recovering from a failure) are usually straightforward. The only thing I don’t back up is my collection of Linux ISOs, but that I can easily reacquire.

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salacious_coaster@infosec.pub ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
If you can, I’d skip the laptop and go for a used workstation SFF now. $250 or so would buy you plenty of server.

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- jonathan7luke@lemmy.zip ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  That’s a fair point, but I kind of want to tinker around on the laptop without worrying too much about breaking things and figure out what all I actually want to self-host. That will help me figure out what sort of hardware I need.
  
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