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EDIT: Thank you all for your replies. I love the Lemmy community!

Here’s an idea of the backup flow that I think would fit neatly with our computer usage. There are stretches of time (week-long) where I don’t even wake the computer up.

1. syncthing syncs stuff from our laptops onto the server.
2. deja-borg-restic-dup-or-whichever-encrypted-iterative-backup-solution-wins-my-heart then proceeds to take “snapshots” of the data which syncthing delivered to the server. One weekly and one monthly snapshot for each laptop.
3. The server proceeds to send the snapshots to an off-site server somewhere, a Back Blaze type deal where I might keep a couple of weeks and months worth in backups.

Something like that?

Both me and the wife live comfortably on 512GB SSD each so there is not a ton of data to be dealt with. Thing looking to be backed up are basically the XDG user directories á Desktop, Documents, Photos, Music et cetera…

My worries with the ARM SBCs are the specific disto images built for them. How long does support/maintenance last for one of these images? I know it depends on the distro. My worries are that as new iterations of a board is dropped onto the market the images for the older board get more and more neglected. Maybe that does not matter and the images basically just “drivers” which once implemented are good for years and years to come?

Dream would be something along the lines of an Odroid HC4 (OLED) with a Void Linux (it’s my jam) image running on an SSD along with a beefy 6TB HDD. Low cost, low electricity, redundant enough if off-site backups are implemented. Have the OLED display current updates available and status for syncthing and deja-borg-dup-kup-restic-blaze.

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TL;DR: What I want from this post is to hear and be inspired by how you go about backups and or other services and general home server thoughts. Hardware, software, family constellation, maintenance routines and other aspects related to your setup.

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I just realized I have not had any local backups of files and photos since 2015-16~ when I left the fruit-computer sphere and their Time Machine. Instead I’ve relied on Dropbox and more recently Mega for two-way file sync to act as a backup.

Difference between those days and now is that I have my own family with needs for proper backups and it has to be done via a local server solution/NAS. Furthermore, it makes little sense sending files to unknown servers using services like Dropbox and Mega.

Big time option-paralizys going on here.

ARM or X86 - Proxmox, non-rolling vs rolling - SBC kit, tower, rack or prebuilt NAS for home use. TDP and wattage. Quicksync. Stay on Linux or hop on over to freeBSD for proper ZFS or fully embrace BTRFS and stay with what I know best. I heard XFS is a thing too…

Going slightly insane weighing all the options against each other and options in different combinations against each other.

Trying to avoid resource and money waste by informing myself enough to make purchases with good longevity.

Many thanks for any input on these matters! :)