this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2025
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I've been self-hosting Home Assistant for over a year, and I want to take the dive into more self-hosting. I want to start by converting an old laptop into a home server. Assuming that goes well, I'll probably want to upgrade to a more modern, purpose built server and NAS fairly soon. How can I make sure that what I set up on the laptop can be easily moved to my upgraded hardware later?

Additional notes:

  • I'm already using Tailscale (it's what prompted me to want to do more self-hosting)
  • I want to be able to access my server via Tailscale, but I want everything mapped to my own custom domain via a reverse proxy
  • I'm planning on using Proxmox

Thanks in advance for the advice! :)

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[–] tofu@lemmy.nocturnal.garden 6 points 5 days ago (2 children)

With Proxmox it's quite easy, you can copy the VM/LXC Backups to the new host (via SCP, NFS or whatever) and restore there. Recently did exactly that.

[–] jonathan7luke@lemmy.zip 3 points 5 days ago

Sounds pretty straightforward. Thanks for the info!

[–] frongt@lemmy.zip 2 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

You could even just create a cluster and do a migration. I don't think you need zfs for that, you only need zfs for replication.

[–] tofu@lemmy.nocturnal.garden 3 points 5 days ago (2 children)

Should work indeed, but they'd need replicated space. I'm not sure how well that works if the cluster is only designed to be temporary, since removing a productive node from a cluster is a bit risky?

[–] jonathan7luke@lemmy.zip 2 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I’m not sure how well that works if the cluster is only designed to be temporary, since removing a productive node from a cluster is a bit risky

Good callout. Just did some reading on the concept of maintaining a quorum, which I didn't know about. Definitely need to be careful if I go with that approach, but it does sound interesting! I'm not entirely opposed to leaving the old laptop as a node and then using it for experimental stuff or maybe running just one specific standalone service on it after moving the critical stuff to the new server.

[–] frongt@lemmy.zip 1 points 5 days ago (1 children)

You don't need multiple devices and quorum unless you're using HA. I have two nodes just so I can migrate back and forth when doing updates instead of shutting all the VMs down. No quorum, no HA.

[–] jonathan7luke@lemmy.zip 1 points 5 days ago

Oh, nice! Thanks for explaining that. I didn't realize there was a way to run a cluster without HA.

[–] frongt@lemmy.zip 2 points 5 days ago

I edited, since it was ambiguous. I think you only need zfs if you want replication, cold migrations should be fine without it.

Removing nodes from clusters is fine. It's not really encouraged, but if a node fails you have to be able to remove it, so it's possible.