Hi everyone!

My current setup is shit. 5TB external HDD that connects to an old Thinkpad I bought years ago. Does its job, but crashes from time to time and Jellyfin is… impossible to use. Had to set it up on my WINDOWS pc, what a pain.

So, here are my plans for my new tinitiny homelab (I do NEED to mention that I’m from Italy, so a lot of Ebay deals are out of the question without 30 to 50 EUR in shipping, same goes for drives):

  • Used HP EliteDesk 800 G3 -> 134,90 EUR (Ebay)
  • 2 Refurbished Seagate Enterprise Capacity v7 ST12000NM0127 Internal HDD - 12 TB - 3.5" -> 289,98 EUR (Amazon)
  • Nothing else for now!

I have an appropriate ethernet cable so I’ll use that, but I feel like I’m missing something. What I am SURELY missing is a drive for backup capabilities. I want a drive EXCLUSIVE for backups, I don’t know if I should do raid or stuff like that but I want SOME of my data to be accessible in case of failure. I was thinking of a 5TB 2.5" drive but the cost on Amazon / Ebay is not worth it, might aswell take another 12TB one lol.

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So, what am I missing? Before I spend a ton of money and have to wait to play around with my stuff, what do I have to consider? I did some research on the drives / PC so I’m good there, but I don’t know about the underlying technology I should use. Do I just install Ubuntu like on my laptop and run docker like that? Do I get TrueNAS and work with that? CasaOS?

Honestly I just want a docker server where I can spin up my containers easily, nothing more, I’ll do some Kubernetes in the future but for now that’s it.

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Let me know if I missed something or you need more info :)

  • Vairfoley@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Proxmox wouldn’t be a bad option to install on your new server if you want flexibility to run multiple OS/VMs and play around to see what works best for you.

    As for backups, I use rotating external USB HDDs. I keep one offsite and swap them out every week or so for what is in my opinion a pretty simple and cost effective 3-2-1. Maybe grab another external HDD like the one you already have? Otherwise, you could look into something like Backblaze.