

I have a rule that “Nothing will be automated that cannot be manually overridden.”
Well, actually it’s my wife’s rule but it’s a good rule nonetheless. As a result, there’s a big panel full of relays in the basement that is the “last mile” for anything climate control or security related.
There have been a few times when it’s been handy. Like when the exhaust fan isn’t working and I don’t want to debug the ESP32 controller today so I just flip it over to “Manual”.
My advice is avoid tape backups. The cost, risk of media degredation, and management overhead make them not worth it, especially for a homelab.
Also, restoring an entire VM is almost easier than recovering a single file, just because of the sequential nature of reading data from a tape. Data recoveries are pretty slow in general.
I backup to an external hard drive with regular copies to iDrive S3. Been doing it that way for a number of years with no problems.