Homelab

Tool	Description
Immich	High performance self-hosted photo and video management solution
Flame	Flame is self-hosted startpage for your server.
Swag	Nginx webserver and reverse proxy with php support and a built-in Certbot
Trash-guides	Guides mainly for Sonarr/Radarr/Bazarr
Linkding	Self-hosted bookmark manager that is designed be to be minimal,
Wallabag	Wallabag is a self hostable application for saving web pages
Commafeed	Google Reader inspired self-hosted personal RSS reader
Linkwarden	Self-hosted collaborative bookmark manager to collect, organize, and preserve webpages, articles, and documents
Memos	An open-source, lightweight note-taking solution
Maybe	The OS for your personal finances
Actual	A local-first personal finance app
WG-easy	The easiest way to run WireGuard VPN + Web-based Admin UI
Solidtime	Modern open-source time-tracking app
Siyuan	A privacy-first, self-hosted, fully open source personal knowledge management software (PKM)
Online	Collabora Online is a collaborative online office suite based on LibreOffice technology
Paperless-ngx	A community-supported supercharged version of paperless
Kavita	Kavita is a fast, feature rich, cross platform reading server.
Syncthing	Open Source Continuous File Synchronization
Stirling-PDF	Locally hosted web application that allows you to perform various operations on PDF files
Firefly-iii	Firefly III: a personal finances manager
pangolin	Identity-aware VPN and proxy for remote access to anything, anywhere.
lidify	Lidify is built for music lovers who want the convenience of streaming services without sacrificing ownership of their library
Twenty	Open-source self-hosted CRM, a modern alternative to Salesforce

Inspiration

Resources and projects to draw ideas from — not necessarily in use, but worth studying.

Resource	Description
Deployrr	Automated Docker homelab deployer with 150+ pre-configured apps, Traefik, and auth

Backup Storage

3-2-1 Strategy

A simple, resilient backup rule that eliminates every single point of failure.

Number	Rule	Example
3	Three total copies of your data	Original + 2 backups
2	Two different devices / storage media	Local NAS + external drive
1	One copy off-site	Cloud (Backblaze B2, S3…) or remote server

Protects against: human error, drive failure, theft, ransomware, and natural disasters. Source

Incremental Backups with rsync

rsync --link-dest creates space-efficient snapshots: unchanged files become hard links to the previous snapshot instead of new copies, so only new/modified files consume extra space. Source

Key flags

Flag	Purpose
-a	Archive mode — preserves permissions, timestamps, symlinks, owner, group
-v	Verbose output
--delete	Remove files from destination that no longer exist in source
-e ssh	Use SSH as transport for remote backups
--link-dest=DIR	Reference dir; unchanged files become hard links instead of copies

Date-stamped snapshot script

#!/bin/bash
SOURCE=/home/user/data/
DESTBASE=/backup/data
DEST="$DESTBASE/$(date +%Y-%m-%d)"
YESTERDAY="$DESTBASE/$(date -d yesterday +%Y-%m-%d)/"
 
OPTS=""
[ -d "$YESTERDAY" ] && OPTS="--link-dest $YESTERDAY"
 
rsync -av $OPTS "$SOURCE" "$DEST"

Each run creates a new YYYY-MM-DD/ directory. Only changed files are written; the rest are hard-linked from yesterday.

7-day rolling rotation

#!/bin/bash
rm -rf /backup/daily.7
for i in 6 5 4 3 2 1 0; do
    [ -d "/backup/daily.$i" ] && mv "/backup/daily.$i" "/backup/daily.$((i+1))"
done
rsync -a --delete --link-dest=/backup/daily.1 /home/user/data/ /backup/daily.0/

Remote backup over SSH

rsync -av -e ssh /home/user/data/ user@backup-server:/backup/data/

Cron — run daily at 02:00

0 2 * * * /usr/local/bin/backup.sh

Tools

Tool	Description
Duplicati	Free backup software with encryption, deduplication, and cloud support
Restic	Fast, secure, efficient backup program with deduplication and encryption
BorgBackup	Deduplicating archiver with compression and authenticated encryption
Syncthing	Continuous file sync (not a backup, but useful for the 2nd local copy)