2 things, one of which has already been said

Get an SSD and a usb cable for it. Boot off that. Be aware that not all cables are the same (have a Google for usb 3 SSD cables for home assistant before you buy one). There’s a little song and dance you have to do to boot off ext SSD but it’s not hard and doesn’t take long (Google).

That combo will eliminate the SD card issues in the future. But you also need to look into the Google Drive backup add-on. Get that for when shit goes down.

With those two things you should be all set and eliminate this ever happening again. If it does you have a backup.

I’ll be honest and say that most of my self hosted music collection was pirated or ripped from CD like 20 years ago. I put it all on an iPod back then.

I found the iPod gathering dust in a drawer when I finally got a car with a usb jack a couple years ago (yeah I’m not exactly laden with bags of cash over here) and recently pulled all that music back onto my newly set up media server.

I have a Spotify family account I’m trying to phase out with resistance from the children.

To support artists I go and see them when they tour and buy a ludicrously expensive t-shirt

Yeah I know, I use Gluetun now, I was just answering OPs question.

I ran a Linux VM and just had Mullvad app installed and always on, and that was all I needed

Yes

Plex was easy enough to set up. I use plexamp on my phone but can access the Plex server via a browser, which includes my music

Yeah I mean I get it because I was also thinking about self hosting for a long time and had a bunch of questions myself.

The problem is that a lot of the questions were not needed, and a bunch of the other questions I answered myself by just tooling around with the stuff.

Great comment btw, it’s a good idea to have a list of the services you’d like to run, in order of importance z then work through it.

I did that then found ways to combine a bunch of services, to the point where I had multiple stand alone VMs that are now just one for Home Assistant and second for Plex and Docker

I see a lot of posts like this and it’s always people overthinking something they haven’t tried to do yet.

So my advice is to just do it.

You may lose everything at some point in the future, Satan knows I have a few times, but because you’ve actually done it, you can do it again.

Now, because you’re just thinking about doing it, it seems like a massive deal because you’ve not gone out and done it yet.

As for recommendations, I use a Proxmox VM with Debian and Docker. My Proxmox does backups, but my Docker compose is also a text document on my PC so I can recreate it all from scratch from that. I also have an idea what I did when I was learning how to do it, and have retained a good bit of that info so I could probably do it without either the backups or the Docker Compose, it would just take longer.

Just do it

Commenting just to add “nofail” to the fstab.

I didn’t do this in Proxmox and then the drive stopped working and so did Proxmox. As a noob I ended up starting fresh and losing lots.

After adding nofail the services start up, just without the NAS attached. Without nofail it just doesn’t boot.

Nofail for the win

Just Google “Booting a pi from an SSD” and follow the steps

I can’t remember the steps (they were simple though) but when my Home Assistant raspi SD card died, I bought a 128gb SSD from AliExpress and a usb-sata cable.

I then did something to the pi that meant it can boot from the SSD, and flashed the SSD using Balenetcher or RUFUS or whatever (same program I was using to flash my SD cards basically).

Then it was just a case of plugging in and turning it on.

Runs exactly the same as with an SD card with less dying because SD cards aren’t meant for a lot of read/write but SSDs do.

Me too, except it’s Adguard for me.

Came in handy yesterday actually. I have a friend who works for a University which was recycling some Chromebooks.

He managed to grab 3 for me, one for myself and one for my kids.

Problem is that one of my kids is being supervised through Google Family Link which means for some reason the Play Store won’t work.

So he is now unsupervised in Family Link just to get the Chromebook working.

So I’ve just given both my kids static IPs and pointed their Chromebooks at Adguard, then turned on Safe Search and adult content blocking.

Now I’m fairly confident they’re protected from a lot of the bad shit on the internet.

I’ve passed my display through to a VM in Proxmox for transcoding and now I can’t get the GUI for that VM.

Is this something that would allow me to connect to that VM on another PC and use a virtual desktop?

If so, I may have to have a play with it. I mean I’m happy away using SSH but why not have UI if I can?

Good to know, I’ll turn it off when I get home from work, thanks

If I don’t port forward, my friends that I’ve shared with can’t see the instance

Imho easy mode is just throwing it on Plex and making sure your port is set up on your router for external access, then just sharing your music folder in Plex.

No need for a domain or anything

My problem with this solution was that I have signed in to Tailscale via my Google account, and I have to buy Mullvad through Tailscale, linking my Google account to the Mullvad account.

What I wanted to do was have my own Mullvad account and route Tailscale through it, but that wasn’t possible, I had to have Tailscale manage Mullvad, which just didn’t sit right with me.

Yeah the new VM should just draw from your remaining RAM. My Debian VM is only using a few GB (6? 8?) but my Dell (I have a 7050 so it can’t be so different from yours) still has 10gb to play with.

As for the running out of USBs I guess you could run a usb hub to one of the usb ports and just pass through the one, although I don’t know if that would break something.

I don’t think they do a powered usb c to sata but I could be wrong. I’ve used 3/4 of the ports on the back for HDDs, and the remaining one for my ZigBee stick for Home Assistant VM and have one spare (on the front) plus the usb C. I have passed that usb C through to a VM for a usb c to 3.5mm (to send music to speakers) in the past though.

You could try a usb to sata (powered) and a usb c to usb a to plug in to the usb C socket I guess, try that? I have a few usbc-a adapters knocking around the house so if you’re the same you could try it for nothing

I have also got a dell optiplex and Proxmox and a Debian machine with mostly Arr in containers.

I also have 3 old HDDs that I’m using for it, of various sizes (2x1tb and 3/4tb)

I have used a powered usb3 to sata connector to hook them up to the Dell. As in I have 3 usb to sata connectors, and each one also has a plug socket. I’ve got those 3 plus my Dell in a 4 gang extension lead so it’s only using 1 plug socket in my kitchen. They were about £15 each on Amazon.

I have had a gotcha from using usb that destroyed my setup.

I now have a working solution that will stop this happening again:

So I have 3 usb-sata HDDs hooked in via the usb ports. I set up Open Media Vault as a VM. Then I passed through the USB drives to the OMV VM.

Those drives are then shared via SMB (I’ve just added NFS) to everything that needs it via the OMV VM.

I can then access the HDDs via this SMB share in Proxmox for backups if that’s what you wanna do.

Now the reason I’ve done it this way is because originally I had the drives in Proxmox. I gave them names and then put those names in the Fstab of Proxmox. One of the drives “forgot” it’s name and Proxmox wouldn’t then boot because one of its drives wasn’t accessible.

You could get around this by adding an option to the end of your fstab, I think the option is “nofail” but I’m not 100% so just check up on it.

I’ve used this option in my Debian VM Fstab to mount the NAS drives so my Arr stack can see them, and even got my Squeezebox server using them too. I’m using CIFS so I can see the drives on my Windows PC so I can manage the storage on my desktop.

So there you go, usb HDDs with passed through usb sockets to OMV VM is how I do it. If one of the drives fails OMV still runs and I just find I have no media in Plex and have to figure out why my drive isn’t working anymore.

It’s the same reason I like running things in Docker; you can just wake up and read about something while enjoying your morning shit, then switch the computer on and try and boot it before that thing you’re meant to be doing. If you can’t do it you can just delete it and try again later.

I started Self Hosting with Proxmox 4 months ago and so far my only real snafu has been mapping drives directly to Proxmox with Fstab. If you’re gonna do it, add “nofail” FFS.

I pass my drives through to my NAS VM to handle rather than Proxmox because it’s easier to fix my NAS if it fucks up using Proxmox, than to try and fix a none-booting Proxmox.

Anyway now I’m at a point of stability and dim sat thinking about redoing it bare bones, but I love tinkering so I’m sure this is just the plateau before I discover something new to play with, so I’m keeping Proxmox