So yesterday, I wrote about my home lab fiasco. I’ve managed to get some things set back up now, but it’s time for the report of what all I lost because of my poor backup habits.

First, I was able to salvage my RSS feeds and my Linkding stuff. That was the most important part for me, so I’m quite happy. I ended up losing my castopod setup, my glace setup, and my searx history.

My Nextcloud was lost, but I have all the data. All of my Tautulli data (Plex tracking) was also lost completely.

The New Set Up⌗

I ended up finding out that the network card in my home server isn’t compatible with the newer kernel that came with Debian Trixie. That’s what caused that setup to go belly up. Once I figured that out, I was able to get some of the data off, so I’m glad about that.

I didn’t want to ditch this hardware, though I thought about downgrading. But instead, I’ve installed Ubuntu 24.04 LTS on there, and I’ll stick with it forever. It, at least so far, has been working fine. It’s not as fancy as Proxmox, but it will do the job.

The first change that I made after that was to ditch nginx and switch to Tailscale. Tailscale is pretty cool, it basically sets up a targeted VPN so you don’t have to open any ports into your network. It was also pretty easy to setup. I’m also working on moving all of my docker-compose files to one singular file. That way next time I need to setup, I’ll be able to get everything back fairly quickly.

I’m also going to setup borgbackup on the server to backup my files this time. I should have done that before, but lesson learned.

Since I’m setting everything up again, I’ll probably go through and try out some new self hosted apps. I haven’t don that for a while. Should be fun, and might take the sting off of having to do this in the first place.

This was day 23 of Blaugust 2025