Yeah, I’m planning to spin them down so infrequently that it shouldn’t matter in the long run.

I currently have exactly this setup but I really want to migrate to a single machine :)

I’ll consider this!

I’m possibly biased by the amount of initial fiddling with all the disks and pcie cards and hunting down where the noise was coming from. Will keep in mind.

This could be an option I guess - however the current case is a HP z440, which is SO convenient for building in that I need an extra good reason to get rid of it. Zero screws, just latches. Carrying handles.

Thanks - from what I see myu CPU doesn’t support VT-d, only VT-x, which at a glance makes it not suitable for passing through these drives safely. I’ll get to dismantling the NAS VM setup actually.

Thanks! This sounds like an option.

I’ll gladly take the advice on the NAS VM, I see so many tutorials virtualising TrueNAS and not a lot of the opposite viewpoint. If it’s not a good practice I’d indeed rather recycle that setup while I’m at it.

I don’t need to keep using Proxmox, or TrueNAS for that matter. If I need to DIY this with bare metal Debian, I will. My constraint is to have both always-on services and on-demand HDD backed services on the same machine. Sky is the limit after that…

Scheduling doesn’t sound the best indeed, which is why I’d ideally want a simple button that I can click from a GUI.

Not an option, because it will also run some essential services off SSD’s. :/

Practically every house and apartment has (access to) a sauna. If not inside the apartment, there will most often be a shared sauna in the basement.

About the UK, I’m going to go a bit deeper and note that it was somehow eye-opening that there’s a whole society that actually just daily drives English. For my whole life before the visits to UK and later US, English was the language of the internet and some specific international situations where it was most people’s second language. Until well into my mid-20s, I basically didn’t have real life contact with any community that would just speak English natively, despite speaking it myself fairly okay-ish.

Huh.

There’s a time and place for a DIY solution and academia can well be like that sometimes.

The latest Mac Mini can’t run Linux though. It’s M4 and asahi doesn’t even support M3 chips yet. But if you actually got the previous model with M1/M2 you can do Linux if desired. I might not attempt, and just use the Mac as a server as-is. It’s not too different from Linux. Asking the duck for “how to xx on Mac” when you already know the Linux equivalents should make your life tolerable.

Get base Debian, you’ll have more options for desktop environment. Once you get past the installation hassle it should just work for the rest of times. MX has its place but it’s specifically made to have no systemd which may not be something a new user is looking for. It feels very opinionated, is what I’m trying to say. May be your thing of course, but I’d recommend reading more on its philosophy before picking.

8 years is probably not old enough to require lighter desktops if the machines were at least mid range at the time. You should be able to use gnome or KDE as you please. Nothing against XFCE in principle, but it can be a little clunky especially for a laptop. No touch gestures, for example.

I have an external storage unit a couple kilometers away and two 8TB hard drives with luks+btrfs. One of them is always in the box and after taking backups, when I feel like it, I detach the drive and bike to the box to switch. I’m currently researching btrbk for updating the backup drive on my pc automatically, it’s pretty manual atm. For most scenarios the automatic btrfs snapshots on my main disks are going to be enough anyway.

Oh yeah and I did enable Proxmox VM firewall for the TrueNAS, the NFS traffic goes via an internal interface. Wasn’t entirely convinced by NFS’s security posture when reading about it… At least restrict it to the physical machine 0_0 So I now need to intentionally pass a new NIC to any VM that will access the data, which is neat.

A wrap-up of what I ended up doing:

• Replaced the bare metal Ubuntu with Proxmox. Cool cool. It can do the same stuff but easier / comes with a lot of hints for best practices. Guess I’m a datacenter admin now
• Wiped the 2x960GB SSD pool and re-created it with ZFS native encryption
• Made a TrueNAS Scale VM, passed through the SSD pool disks, shared the datasets with NFS and made snapshot policies
• Mounted the NFS on the Ubuntu VM running my data related services and moved the docker bind mounts to that folder
• Bought a 1Gbps Intel network card to use instead of the onboard Realtek and maxed out the host memory to 16GB for good measure

I have achieved:

• 15min RPO for my data (as it sits on the NFS mount, which is auto-snapshotted in TrueNAS)
• Encryption at rest (ZFS native)

I have not achieved (yet…):

• Key fetch on boot. Now if the host machine boots I have to log in to TrueNAS to key in the ZFS passphrase. I will have to make some custom script for this anyway I guess to make it adapt to the situation as key fetching on boot is a paid feature in TrueNAS but it just makes managing the storage a bit easier so I wanna use it now. Disabled auto start on boot for the services VM that depends on the NFS share, so I’ll just go kick it up manually after unlocking the pool in TrueNAS.

Quite happy with the setup so far. Looking to automate actual backups next, but this is starting to take shape. Building the confidence to use this for my actual phone backups, among other things.

Really good to know. Planned to keep using very mainstream LTS versions anyway, but this solidifies the decision. Maybe on a laptop I’ll install something more experimental but that’s then throwaway style.

I guess I’ll give it a spin. There seems to be a big community around it. I initially thought I might migrate later so keeping the host OS layer as thin as possible. Ubuntu was mainly an easy start as I was familiar with it from before and the spirit in this initiative is DIY over framework - but if there’s a widely used solution for exactly this… Yeah.

Always a good reminder to test the backups, no I would not sleep properly if I didn’t test them :p

Aiming to keep it simple, too many moving parts in the VM snapshots / hard to figure out best practices and notice mistakes without work experience in the area, so I’ll just backup the data separately and call it a day. But thanks for the input! I don’t think any of my services have in-memory db’s.

Right, thanks for the heads up! On the desktops I have simply installed zfs as root via the Ubuntu 24.04 installer. Then, as the option was not available in the server variant I started to think maybe that is not something that should be done :p

Aight thank you so much, confirms I’m on the right path! This clarifies a lot, I’ll keep the ext4 boot drive :)