It’s not for lack of trying, but I’ve never really been able to successfully set up redirects in Traefik or Caddy

Even asking ChatGPT for help.

I ended up having success using Nginx Proxy Manager, which has a beautiful interactive UI. Despite running from a DockerCompose /Portainer

Now… if only I could distill the entire configuration into a backup file…

One thing for you to consider: Software RAID is no longer a dirty word and somewhat suspicious.

As current processors have a lot of power available, it becomes unnecessary to have a controller and a specialized processor. You can find good and solid RAID systems in free software, much more tested than a controller from… a beginner manufacturer.

More flexible configurations, more maintenance and recovery tools, more sophisticated security, better logs and, especially, great integration into virtualization platforms like Vmware and Proxmox.

A low-end motherboards usually have only 4 native SATA ports, the ones with more are costly. You will need a extra pci-e sata raid card (4 a 6 ports, usually), but they are dirt cheap.

If you are use mostly as a Plex box, a Linux with Docker/Portaineir is good enough. But you can explore some ‘storage oriented’ distros, like Unraid (non-free, but isn’t costly), who also can run a dockerized Plex without problems.

I am very partial about of use of MergerFS storage, the ‘poor man raid’, as I said. Without redundancy or disaster recovery, but easy and cheaper to build.

I use a very barebones solution in Linux to backup every 2 or 3 weeks my 14Tb of media. I use only as cold backup, to prevent brainfart data losses mainly. I only turn on the disks when I will start a backup and run a very basic rsync command, they stay 90%+ of time turned off.

I have 2 external USB3 HDs (8+10), in ext4 format. Then I use the ‘poor man raid’ MergerFS to fuse both in a unique directory.

MergerFS is a odd duck in the system files, it only ‘binds’ two files systems at directory level, you can see the individual files in one disk or the other even with the filesystem is mounted. No redundancy, no parallel read, but it trys balance the files between drivers.

But WHEN my internal data became bigger than my backup I only need add another driver, change a script command line and have more capacity without the dangers of a RAID rebuild. Or size consistency issues. If you lost a disk you WILL lost data, but is easy peaky change the faulty disk and start again without lost ALL data, a real danger when you need rebuilt a RAID.

It’s slow but rock solid, I use it in my internal mass media disks too. I even migrated the disks (with all data) between two machines, without problems.

By the way, my main system/game disks are two 1Tb M2 in RAID0, for performance, it’s a different need.

Before some months ago my domestic server are a archaic Core 2 Duo refurbished workstation and my desktop a 2013 MacBook.

A souped-up desktop with some silent (Noctua) fans now can do both the roles, with a lot less hassle.

I am a old geek, 30+ years in IT, and, believe me, I tried.

I tried Proxmox and gave up, too much complicated in how to share mass storage between different VMs

Now I use PopOS, the “poor man raid” MergerFS to store the data and Docker/Portaineir to run my services: Plex, Jellyfin and Syncthing. And there’s still plenty of power to occasionally play Diablo4 using Lutris.

PopOS is already pre-configured for games, otherwise my choice is Debian. I’m a little suspicious about Ubuntu, I believe it is positioning itself to sell a premium version. Or worse, for a monthly subscription.

I always use external and absolute paths in every app

• /home/myuser/docker/myapp/config:/config
• /data/media:/media

Easier to backup critical configuration files or share media files between apps. Example, a syncthing shared dir became the jellyfin media source.

And a convenient way to ‘reset’ a badly crashed app… or a lost password. Almost all the apps can rebuild itself if they lost their configuration files.