My mini PC has one main job: keeping the media library stocked and organised without me touching it. Five services, each doing one thing:

  • Prowlarr — indexers in one place. Instead of configuring the same trackers separately in every app, they all go through Prowlarr.
  • Sonarr — TV. Watches for new episodes of the shows I follow, grabs them, renames and files them properly.
  • Radarr — the same thing for films.
  • qBittorrent — the download client they all share.
  • Jellyfin — the library front end. Open-source, no account needed, streams to everything in the house.

The whole stack runs on an N100 mini PC. It’s total overkill for the job, which is exactly what you want in a server: quiet, sips power, and never breaks a sweat even when everything decides to grab at once.

The part people skip is the backup, which gets its own post. The media itself is replaceable. The configs and databases — hundreds of shows tracked, custom formats, history — are not. Lose those and you’re rebuilding everything by hand.

Day to day it just works. Every few months something needs a nudge — an indexer goes down, a naming conflict needs sorting — but 99% of the time the only reason I open any of it is to see what’s new.

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