March 8, 2026
Backups, beef, and baked ziti
My Homelab Setup
My Homelab Setup: Helpful hacks, backup beef, and a “1% lab” jab
TLDR: A photographer built a simple home server for safer photo backups and apps like Immich and Mealie, with off‑site copies to Backblaze. Comments split between helpful tips (reverse proxy, password manager tweaks) and heated debates over backup tools and “too basic” setups—proving even small labs spark big opinions.
A modest photo-backup makeover turned into a full-on neighborhood roast. The author ditched manual copy‑paste for a repurposed 2018 gaming PC running TrueNAS (a storage-focused system) with two 8TB drives mirroring each other and frequent snapshots—think save points for files. They’re also self-hosting crowd faves like Immich for phone photos, Mealie for recipes, Scrutiny for drive health, and Backrest using restic to back up to Backblaze B2. Rising hard drive prices—blamed on AI data centers—pushed them to build now.
Cue the comments: one camp brought tips, not torches. kleebeesh pitched running Nginx as a “reverse proxy”—a single front door with easy names like “photos.home” instead of juggling ugly IP numbers and ports. linsomniac dropped a Bitwarden trick to stop the password manager from mixing up logins. Practical, tidy, chef’s kiss.
Then the backup wars exploded. navigate8310 asked why use restic at all when TrueNAS has built-in options, while freetonik evangelized BorgBase as a simpler paid alternative. And sgt tossed a spicy spark: this setup is “like 1% of typical Homelabs,” implying it’s baby tier. The clapback vibe: simple beats nothing, and not everyone needs a data center in their closet. Meanwhile, the jokes rolled in about serving recipes next to AI models—“from meal prep to model prep”—and the eternal meme: RAID mirrors aren’t backups… unless you’ve also got off-site, which this user does. Internet verdict: small lab, big feelings, useful advice.
Key Points
- •A 2018 gaming PC was repurposed into a homelab with TrueNAS Community Edition for NAS and app hosting.
- •Storage uses two 8 TB HDDs in RAID 1 for redundancy, plus a Samsung 850 Evo SSD and a WD Blue SN550 NVMe for the OS.
- •Snapshots are scheduled hourly, daily, and weekly, with automatic pruning to manage storage space.
- •Backups are handled via Backrest/restic to an object storage bucket on Backblaze B2.
- •Self-hosted apps include Scrutiny (S.M.A.R.T. monitoring), Immich (photo/video management), Mealie (recipes), and Ollama (local AI models).