Occasional notes on self-hosting, backups and quiet servers.
Dashboards are wonderful until the one night the monitoring itself is down. A paper log with dates, disk serials and the last known-good configuration has saved me more than once. This page is the public corner of that habit: short notes, nothing fancy, updated when there is something worth writing down.
On backups. A backup you have never restored is a rumour. Once a quarter I pick a random archive and actually boot from it.
On updates. Boring systems stay up. I pin versions, read the changelog, and let other people discover the exciting bugs first.
On monitoring. Three numbers matter: disk, temperature and the age of the last successful backup. Everything else is decoration.