Most critical infrastructure like my mail i subscribe to the release and blog rss feed. My OSs send me Update notifications via Mail (apticron), those i handle manual. Everything else auto updates daily.

You still need to check if the software you use is still maintained and receives security updates. This is mostly done by choosing popular and community drive options, since those are less likely to get abandoned.

Is adding a URL too much? Jellyfin is also just login in addition to enter the server URL.

You have basically two options.

1. Symmetric Encryption. That means you use the same password/key for writing the Backup and for reading the backup. Here you have to write the password somewhere, depending on the OS there are options like keychains or similar that can hold the password so that the password is only available once you are loged in or have unlocked the keychain.

2. Asymmetric Encryption. That means you have different passwords/keys to read and write the backup. PGP is an example here. Here you can just simply use one key to write the backup, this key can become public and you do not have to worry about your backup since it will only be readable with the 2. key.

I personally use Restic with a password that is only readable by the system root user stored on the filesystem. Since I use Full Disk Encryption i do not have to worry too much about when the secret is available in clear text at runtime.

Yes thats why i said in theory. I doubt that many residential IPs are blacklisted, but still not optimal.

IPv6 only works but there are probably many Mail Servers that are IPv4 only, so you will not receive mails from them.

If you are serious about it, rent a VPS or get a static IP on your residential connection.

It would be more reliable to use a ‘clean’ not blacklisted static IP.

But in theory you could just use ddns and update the IP. But I actually never tried it.

Mailcow comes ready out of the box. Just change the DNS entries according to Mailcow and you are good to go.

This has been said over and over again. I have been hosting Mail now for over 2 years and have yet to encounter any problems. Although, i would not recommend to set it up manually and rather advise to use one of the ‘all in one’ suggested solutions here in the thread.

A project ending as abandonware is always a possibility. One reason projects get abandoned is losing funding, which can be secured by using dual licensing and selling some features to businesses.

That is not my point.

Having a CE or OS version and an Enterprise Version can lead to conflict of interest. Do you add a feature to the OS Version or do you spend time on the Enterprise feature? There are a lot of examples, Emby is one, others are escaping me right now.

There are other models that work well like paid support etc. Nonetheless i will stay away.

Looks amazing. But the dual licensing scares me. The open variant could be artificially limited in functionality or could end up basic abandon ware.

Mailcow is amazing.

Importing exporting i would just use any mailclient and drag-drop them over. Depending on how many Mailboxes you have to transfer.

I am not understanding the issue you have with DNS?

Just have a script that updates the DNS entry to your current public IP. If you do not like Cloudflare there are plenty of other services that offer a free API with their DNS service.

I think you are misunderstanding something here.

If i understand you correctly, your Server is accessing the VM disk images via a NFS share?

That does not sound efficient at all.

I assume you are referring to Filesystem Snapshotting? For what reason do you want to do that on the client and not on the FS host?

sshfs is somewhat unmaintained, only “high-impact issues” are being addressed https://github.com/libfuse/sshfs

I would go for NFS.

HA had 2 security audits. I would not worry too much. Always depends on what you can control with it. https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2023/10/19/security-audits-of-home-assistant/

Just subscribe to the release channel. That varies from OS to OS or Software, but is worth it.

Use tools that are universal. For example, I have not used TrueNAS Scale because they did not support native docker at the time. OS specific solutions are more likely to break then universal once (truecharts vs docker)

To get up and running again after a complete failure i can just download the latest config and data from my backup and set up any distro that supports docker and my system is running again.

I do OS upgrades when they are available, usually within 1 or 2 days and containers are updated with watchtower daily.

The main difference i would say is the development and licensing model. Photo prism is forcing ppl who want to commit to sign a CLA to.give away their rights. Also the community is not really active it is mainly one dev that can change the code license on any given time.

Immich does not have such an agreement and has a huge active contributor community around it. Also Immich is backed by Futo which has its pros and cons.

Imho the biggest pain in self hosting is when a foss product turns evil towards its community and start to practice anti consumer/free selfhosters business practices.

Immich is far less likely to turn evil.

Edit: I think it is the biggest pain cause you have to migrate every device and person to the new service.

That’s also my take on the topic and that is also what backblazes data is suggesting. Would they not believe it themself then they would stop buying unreliable drives. Every brand can have outlier models that have a bad failure rate.

I use dd.

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Go with the drive with the best money/TB rate that meets your criterias. I would consider everything above ironwolf or red plus fitting for NAS use. Data center drives are in my experience often cheaper than NAS drives. (wd ultrastar or seagate exos or toshiba enterprise capacity)

Look for the warranty. Some times another drive for just a couple of bucks gives you a way longer warranty.