I wanted to shared my enthusiasm, which makes me feel like a little boy (despite me being 50+) fascinated by how such complex systems can be managed so easily by novices. I started using Proxmox recently. I had a machine running one VM with various docker images installed. But NVMe was tiny. So I setup another node and got it to share the same NFS share on the NAS, where I had saved full backups of the VM. Once added the NFS share to the new node (with a bigger ZFS local partition) I simply restored the VM from the NFS share that had been backed up from the original node. It seemlessly imported and started. Then I cloned on the new node so that I could get it on the new ZFS partition. Now the next task is to get a bigger NVMe on the original machine, install Proxmox from scratch, and add to cluster so that it shared the backup NFS share. I just then need to understand how to get HA up and running so that VMs are always synced flawlessly. Proxmox is super brilliant. I feel like I have a data center at home :-) I could not imagine this system was so flexible and relatively easy to use. The people that deliver and contribute to this stuf are super cool. A couple of proxmox nodes, a Truenas scale NAS and a good backup strategy and your data is really safe and rock solid … I hope :-)
Maybe if the model trains could actually bring in your groceries and mow your lawn they’d be comparable. Granted, self-hosted software can’t do those exact things either, but it can do an awful lot of the digital stuff that’s part of our lives now which often takes up just as much time and effort if not more. Model trains are a banger hobby, but homelabbing can easily be more than just a hobby, it’s deeply practical too, and I’d argue it’s actually a necessity for establishing personal digital sovereignty and privacy going forward.