MangoPenguin

You don’t technically need to back up the PBS server as there’s not much there other than a basic config. As far as the backup data itself, you can mirror to another PBS server or I think it supports S3 for offsite storage.

The immich public proxy app is built for this, you run it on your isolated public VLAN, and it displays a shared album to people while loading the images from immich.

Avoid mini PCs if you want upgrades later on IMO.

The SFF or MT form factors are a lot better, I’d say MT is the best as it has full height PCIe slots. Keep in mind the dell/hp/lenovo models all use proprietary motherboard form factors and power supplies, but not that big of a deal I think since there are so many parts available if something does break.

I highly recommend 7th gen intel or newer, as you get the much better quicksync support and quality.

If you get a desktop class CPU (i5-7500 for example), the whole computer will typically draw around 15W at idle with an SSD, which is pretty decent.

If you need less idle power draw then you’ll want a mobile/notebook class CPU (like an i3-7100u) as the idle usage should be less than 5W. But those typically only come in the micro/mini form factors.

Also good to remember that every 3.5" HDD draws around 7W when idle and spun-up (typically difficult to spin down on servers since there’s always some process accessing files).

Maybe run the public VPN at home with NAT enabled, and use it as the default gateway in the private VPN. Never done it but I think I’ve seen some guides on that concept.

I set up Plex/Jellyfin specifically to get away from having to manage media manually, it tracks watch states, gets subtitles, transcodes for me when I’m traveling, and does all of that for family too.

MPV is neat but its just a standard media player app like VLC, not really anywhere near the same concept as Jellyfin.

I didn’t say that, I said almost! Generally disk IO is where VMs fall short on performance vs a container.

Extra security and full isolation with its own kernel, so you can load kerne modules and such.

Also can run Windows in a VM when needed, or MacOS.

It’s interesting because you’re not the first person to complain about getting ISOs in Proxmox, but on my instance if I click on my local storage it has an upload ISO button, and a download ISO from URL button right there, so it’s really simple.

Is it all automated with versioning intervals and stuff? Or is restic required as a third party step and maintaining a duplicate of data on the server for it to grab?

Overall it sounds like a decent VM manager but is meant for enterprise stuff where they’ll be building their own backup systems.

That’s what proxmox has too, but snapshots aren’t backups and aren’t being sent to a remote backup server… You’re also not supposed to keep snapshots around for very long, whereas I have backups going back several months.

Or are you sending snapshots to a remote server? I think ZFS can do that, so maybe that’s an option I can look at.

This looks interesting, how do you handle automated backups of all the VMs/Containers? Their docs kind of seem to say “stop everything and figure it out”, but with Proxmox I’m used to it handling everything automatically to my PBS server every night.