Tag: homelab

Backblaze B2 + rclone: Tiered Backup at Real-World Costs

Stop burning money on AWS egress fees. Here is how to build a real tiered backup strategy using Backblaze B2 plus rclone for your home lab setup in 2026.

Ceph for a 3-Node Home Lab: When It Actually Pays Off

Ceph on 3 nodes: real hardware requirements, honest performance tradeoffs, and exactly when distributed storage beats a plain NFS share for your home lab.

Kdenlive Proxy Editing on Weak Hardware

Edit 4K (or chunky 1080p60) on a mini PC without the timeline turning into a slideshow. Kdenlive proxies plus VAAPI/NVENC for cheap homelab editing.

Cosmos vs CasaOS vs Umbrel: All-in-One Home Server OSes Compared

Cosmos, CasaOS, and Umbrel each try to make self-hosting one-click. Here's how they actually compare on UI, security, app catalogs, and the all-important escape hatch when you outgrow them.

Snapper for Btrfs Snapshots on Root Filesystems

Set up Snapper on Btrfs to auto-snapshot before every system update, roll back broken machines in minutes, and never lose a working root filesystem again.

Plex Pass Hits $749. Time for Jellyfin.

Plex tripled the lifetime price to $749. Here's a decision tree plus a working Jellyfin migration plan: Docker, transcoding, clients, watch history.

Kopia Repository Server: Multi-Host Backups Done Right

Stop letting every machine write directly to S3. Kopia repository server gives you shared dedup, per-host auth, and sane maintenance — all in one place.

ZFS Send/Receive Over WireGuard for Off-Site Replication

Pipe ZFS incremental snapshots through WireGuard to a friend's NAS or a remote VPS. Encrypted in transit and at rest — no rsync.net bill or vendor lock-in.

mergerfs + SnapRAID: The Poor Man's Unraid

Skip the paid Unraid license. mergerfs + SnapRAID give you flexible JBOD pooling with parity protection on mismatched drives you already own, for free.

Object Storage on a Pi: SeaweedFS Cluster Walkthrough

Run a real S3-compatible object storage cluster on Raspberry Pi 4s with SeaweedFS — low RAM overhead, fast filer, no Ceph drama or surprise cloud bills.

Bind Mounts vs NFS for Container Storage

Bind mounts are fast and simple; NFS is shared and flexible for containers. Pick wrong and your database corrupts at 2 AM. Here is how to choose wisely.

GPU Passthrough on Proxmox: Run LLMs in a VM

GPU passthrough on Proxmox is the best way to isolate LLM workloads — but it's a minefield of IOMMU groups, vfio-pci binding, and Code 43 errors. This post walks through the whole thing end-to-end.