Your home lab should be a testbed for new ideas, techniques, and inspiration while you learn concepts and established wisdom. Of course, it’s no fun without a little chaos as well, and that means sometimes things will break. Well, more often than not, but that’s okay, because with a robust backup plan, you can recover from a disaster in no time at all. It’s also key to having a productive home lab, as you can weed out parts that aren’t providing value while still being able to put them back if you change your mind. Your home lab might have many things running in it, but the backups you’ll need will cover short-term testing and also longer-term archives.
5 Storage
You are running the 3-2-1 backup plan for your home lab right?
While there might be a thing as having too many backups, the only thing we know is that not having enough backups is going to become a problem at some point. The data your home lab generates is important, whether it’s from network monitoring, poking at malware in an airgapped machine, downloads, or other tasks. While following a 3-2-1 backup plan is essential, you don’t want to be constantly sending data out and clogging up your network’s bandwidth.
By setting up automation and file versioning, you can run backups while other tasks are idle and only save changed files, saving bandwidth costs. File versioning also helps with recovery from any issues because it makes it simple to revert a single accidental deletion or a glitched save. But whatever backup plan for your critical data you set up, don’t forget about access control to wherever the backups are stored, and also running backup integrity checks. A backup that’s not tested might as well not exist, and you don’t want to find out your backups are useless when you’re in the middle of a crisis.
4Settings files
Everything you need to recover from a configuration error is contained in the settings files
Almost everything in your home lab takes time and effort to get running the way you want it. The actual installation process of any one device, whether it’s a server, a firewall, router, virtual machine, or container, is minuscule compared to the after-install time you spend tweaking things to how you need it for your experiments, and that’s a problem when something goes wrong and you have to start afresh. Periodically exporting the settings files of your network appliances, services, and other important elements is vital to help you get things working again in the shortest possible time, without forgetting any critical settings that might slip your notice.
On top of exporting these files, it’s wise to document everything that’s going on in your home lab. This could be a simple document with steps taken, but you could take it to the next level by documenting things in Ansible Playbooks, which don’t just keep a record of your steps, they can replicate them automatically, thanks to the easily written YAML syntax and a powerful, operating system agnostic design. That way, you can burn your home lab to the ground (metaphorically, of course), and with a few typed commands, get it back to a working state within the time it takes for the program to run.
4 ways you can automate your home lab with Ansible
Make VM and container management less tedious by integrating Ansible into your home lab
I use Terraform to automatically provision VMs on Proxmox – here’s how
While it may seem rather daunting, Terraform is an amazing automation tool for provisioning virtual machines on your home lab
3Servers
Of course you’re going to back up your most important hardware
The time and effort required to get a powerful server running with virtual machines, containers, services, and other running tools are considerable, and any one of your home lab experiments could break it in new and wonderful ways. Wonderful in every way except that you’ll have to start again, configuring everything from scratch unless you’ve got your servers backed up.
Whether it’s Proxmox or another server OS, setting up a backup solution to keep snapshots of your setup is key to not wasting time and effort in your home lab. It might be fun setting things up from scratch the first few dozen times, but it gets tiring, and in an enterprise environment, you’ll be expected to automate as much as possible anyway. You might as well learn the best practices while there’s no pressure, and backing up your server environment will eventually pay dividends.
4 ways to set up an offsite backup system for your home server
Your home server’s data isn’t backed up unless you have an offsite storage solution.
2Services
Self-hosting is great until you forget to save your important data
Once you discover the joys of self-hosting, it’s hard to stop. From smart home automation to recipe books, container swarms, uptime trackers, and more, you’ll soon end up with scores of services running on your servers. While you could handle these as part of your server backups, the containerized nature of many self-hosted services means you only need to save the config and data files, saving you space on your backup drives. Tools like Kopia are perfect for making these snapshots of your installed services, so you never lose any of your personal data while self-hosting.
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Tired of tedious tasks taking up your free time? You’re going to love these amazing automation tools
1Virtual machines
Once you’ve got VMs set up, save a copy in case your experiments go wrong
Virtual machines are a key part of any home lab, giving you creative ways to spin up new operating systems for testing, destroying, and generally bending to your will. While it might be tempting to set up every VM once before going into it for your experiments, I’ve got a better idea. Once you’ve installed the operating system, updated it, added user accounts and other important features, make a copy or two of that VM.
The amount of disk space that you’ll use up for a copy is minimal compared to any decently sized SSD or HDD, but those few clicks of duplication will save you hours of setup time. The other thing is that it gives you a carbon copy of the VM you’re testing or tweaking, which is essential for the repeatability of any experimentation you are going to attempt. The last thing you want is for your results to be skewed by a misconfigured VM somewhere down the line, and making copies before you start working is how you avoid it. You can even keep copies of popular operating systems and update them every so often so they’re 100% current, so that you have whatever you need when you get a new idea to test.
And if you combine some VM templates with Terraform, and maybe some Ansible as well, you can fully automate the deployment of VMs with any configuration setup of installed programs, user accounts, and settings that you want, enabling some very specific testing conditions that are repeatable every single time you run your tests.
Your home lab experiments will go smoother if you have robust backup plans in place
When planning your home lab, take some time to decide which aspects of it are going to get backed up, and at what stage of their use those backups will run. From saving VMs in a clean state to setup files for everything else, your home lab will run smoother if you’ve got everything backed up and documented so you can recover from failures in minutes. And don’t forget your important data, which should be saved on several machines, and with at least one off-site backup so you can recover from a catastrophe if it occurs.
