I use backrest. It’s incredibly powerful, but has a steep learning curve. A way simpler (not as powerful) alternative is Timeshift. Your distro/DE also probably has a backup app.

I would suggest you start to play around with whatever machine you have in hand. Later on you can migrante to a more serious solution. If you want to first play on a VPS, Hertzner’s are like 4€/month

As for utilities, you could start with (in suggested order over my perceived usefulnes/coolnes/difficulty) Immich, videogame server, Jellyfin, Wireguard, Jupyter server (if you code Python), backrest.

When you want to scale up and migrate into a more “serious” setup, it depends on that you want and your budget. Still, I recommend a multi-disk bay PC (NAS), and go for a dedicated Linux distro (I’m using TrueNAS; not perfect, but overall a very good experience).

Immich has a built-in backup solution, iirc. Still, I would use a different one, so it can easily be used over non-Immich related stuff.

but that one is 500 with no RAM at all, which is quite hefty.

I got mine open box off from eBay. You could search in a similar way. I hunted for a few days, with terms like “NAS”, “N100”, “N150”, “MiniPC”, “4 Bay”, etc.

though I’m not quite sure what to pick best, motherboard being the hardest one.

I’m not sure on this, so take it with a grain of salt, but I think non-NAS oriented mothebaords aren’t optimized for low energy consumption, specially on idle.

Best of luck!

I can’t say this is a good advice by itself; this is simply my setup as I was in your position just 1 month ago, maybe this gives you more ideas.

I recently bought an 16 GB non-ECC DDR5 (which is unnecessary, DDR4 works just fine) open-box 4-disk bay TerraMaster as my main server for the equivalent of around €400, thinking that in a distant future I can buy a different rack just for disks. This model has an Intel N150, which has the H.265 codec, which should handle the transcoding in your Plex instance (which, IMO, you should consider moving to Jellyfin instead in the new computer you end up getting). The 4-disk bay (there are some models with more bays) allows you to get some disks now and then fill up the bays later on if you want to. Note: I just realized this almost reads like a Terramaster ad, that’s not my goal; you can search for similar options from other fabricants.

As for the OS, I insist in recommending you TrueNAS, since it’s Debian-based, since it’s not like Proxmox where everything has to be VM, it’s simply Debian with a nice UI for spinning up Docker instances + disk/snapshot/backups management, all of which are optional: you can easily mount your disk pool and setup them up as a ZRAID (data redundancy in case of disk failure), stripe (no data redundancy), etc., organize everything in easy to use folders, schedule different snapshot schedules for different folders, etc. You can also easily mount Docker containers, either through the “app store” (a selection of Docker containers wrapped in a nice UI for configuration) or manually with docker-compose.yml files. IMO, you lose little, but gain a lot with the OS being already configured for a lot of the stuff you want to do, and the easy to use Web UI.

deleted by creator

I went for an .org and the same happened to me. After digging, Porkbun says is an automated flag of suspicious account, irrelevant to the TLD.

They sell a vulnerability discovery program. IMO, they did this dubious responsable disclousure to get the extra marketing.

Just yesterday I found this video talking about this very topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MucGkPUMjNo

My bet is that Linux will get 10% Steam market share by the end of this year, at most.

No idea, fair point. I remember they definitely oversampled some months ago, and corrected the numbers after publication, but I don’t know if that’s the case here.

Looking at the huge spike in Simplified Chinese number, it seems like yet another oversampling of Chinese computers. A more reliable metric is Linux share for computers with English as their language, currently at >8% for the first time.

Dang, that’s a lot of seperate parts for 1 “simple” task

Agree, but this setup (node-exporter + Prometheus + Grafana) allows for a lot of expansion and customization. I’m sure there are simpler tools that tell you your computer status, and it’s up to you to see which fits more your use-case.

but just seems like there could be an easier way

I’ve felt that way before. But in this case of node-exporter and Prometheus, it’s way simpler. You don’t even need Docker, and the installation for both tools is basically a single line that you can copy and paste from their documentation.

Configuring Prometheus to accept node-exporter is a bit harder I admit, but again you can simply copy and paste the documentation example. The whole process should take like ~10 minutes if you follow the documentation.

Prometheus+Grafana is my go-to. You can also add Drilldown plugin to Grafana and it will monitor Docker logs.

Prometheus is incredibly versatile and widely used, so a lot of projects support metrics export to it, so IMO is your safest blind bet.

For even more custom behaviour, you can create very simple Python scripts that send data to Prometheus.

Prometheus is a metric scrapper, it just recollects metrics from either its own computer or another one. If you want to monitor something, you also need that something to publish metrics, so they can be scrapped by Prometheus.

Thus if you want to monitor even just a single computer, you need node-exporter to publish the metrics, and Prometheus to gather them. Then you can use Grafana to create beautiful dashboards (or use community’s), and even add alarms to it.

You should give NewPipe or Tubular (NewPipe fork with sponsor blocker) a try, it provides a better user experience.

laughs in NewPipe

I’ve done some of that stuff in Python, and n8n is just lovely, far simpler. You can also add a node that runs Python code in n8n, so you only gain simplicity, but lose almost nothing.

The first thing I opened to the internet was a SSH server. 28 minutes after opening it, I started getting constant entry attempts.

Thanks a lot!