Backing up a homelab: configs, not media
Most homelab backup guides get this wrong: they tell you to back up everything, including terabytes of media you could just fetch again. That’s how backups never get set up — the job looks too big, so it stays on the to-do list forever. Back up the configs. The media is replaceable; the configuration isn’t. Once a week, a script on my mini PC grabs the config directories for the media stack — the *arr apps and Jellyfin. It excludes the live databases, logs and sockets (copying a live sqlite file is asking for corruption), then takes proper consistent snapshots of each database with sqlite’s own backup mechanism, and packs the lot into a tarball. About 350MB. Small enough to keep several copies without thinking about it. ...