I saw “fall off” and immediately thought of this aussie gold 😁

I’m a syaadmin now, but self hosting nextcloud is what got me my first IT job. I now host a bunch of stuff (even email!), lemmy included.

how did you decide that you would like to self-host? I wanted my friends to play a cs1.6 map I had created.

dire problems, including those that accumulate over time

That’s not a thing. You create problems over time by experimening in what is, effectively, production load. If all you ever did was install any distro and kept it up to date - not much can break. Granted - shit happens, but it’s incredibly rare.

As an example - I’ve set up my mail server in May 2019. Chose archlinux, because I never wanted to go through a big upgrade. The only exta software installed there is mail-server related. Direct from the repos. I’ve become confident enough that now there’s a nightly cronjob to update the system with a hook to reboot if kernel or init gets updated.

In all those 5 a bit years I’ve had one issue where I hqd to revert a kernel update.

Another example is tang on an ubuntu server. This was at a previous workplace, but essentially it’s a piece of software from the repos. Originally installed on 16.04, has gone without reprovisioning all the way to 22.04. I’ve now left the company, but I hear it’s still running.

Upgrading an ubuntu desktop fleet with a myriad of custom software, on the other hand… let’s just not talk about it.

I’m not the best person to query about backups, but in your situation I would do the following, assuming both server and desktop run on BTRFS:

Have a script on the desktop that starts btrfs-receive and then notifies the server that it should start btrfs-send.

You can also do rsync if BTRFS is not a thing you use, but It would either be expensive storage wise, or you would only ever have 1 backup - latest.

What peace deals were those? Must’ve missed them.