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Comment by NoiseBert69 | Hacker News Reader

I down-leveled my homelab due to energy costs.

It now only consists of a Intel n100 with a big SSD and 32GB RAM running Proxmox. These China TopTon-boxed with their 5x Intel i226-IV network cards are great and can be passively cooled.

Every night the Proxmox makes a backup onto a Raspberry Pi which runs the Proxmox Backup Server.

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I've read that PBS requires fast (NVME-fast) storage and a decent CPU to handle incremental backups efficiently. What speeds do you get when restoring backups?

Using BTRFS.

Just reading of the logs:

- Backup duration: 3.21GiB in 36s

- Restoring a Snapshot: feels like <<1 minute

HDDs work fine for me with PBS, and I get regular 120mb/s HDD speeds when restoring backups. Honestly how often do you restore backups anyways?

Well you should do that frequently, at least to make sure you have restorable ones.

Yup. Mine rates 80W on idle, but it has _two_ NAS boxes, a pair of N150s, a Ryzen APU Steam server, and a beefy i7 with 128GB RAM and a 3060 (which of course is the one burning the most watts in use). Most of it is running Proxmox and backing up VMs to the Synology (which I've demoted to dumb storage with a few Docker containers since they started burning bridges with their customers).

A friend of mine has one of these Enterprise CPUs with many many cores. He sends the entire box to sleep after CICD jobs and wakes them up with WoL.

That is exactly what I do with both the GPU and Ryzen boxes (pro tip: Steam Link will do WoL and wake up your gaming box remotely from both Android and iOS clients - works great on Bazzite)

Space and energy costs are a factor for me too. My current Mac Mini SMB is really good but DAS consumes lot of power. Ideally, I would really love Mikrotik's RB5009UPr+S+IN next iteration to have antennas and a 4-Bay Rose Data Server merged. Gateway, Switch, Access Point, PoE for CCTV and NAS - all in one.

this. the energy costs have made me downscale to micro pcs

Is that also running a router like opnsense, or do you have a dedicated box for that? Curious about specs for networking gear...

Shabby 10 year old Fritzbox is my home LAN. It plays DHCP-Server, VDSL-Modem and Firewall.

Next step will be most likekly a VDSL-modem + something from Ubiquiti as the new Fritz! product portfolio is... a weird mess.

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