Thanks for that. Read Pt1 and it all makes sense.

I’ve found that Music Assistant has worked well for group casting audio for me with Google Minis and Chromecast Audios. Although I’ve not had it running all day, but it has removed the hassle of it stopping from WiFi disconnects from my phone.

Always looking for new ways to do things, so will look out for pts 2 & 3.

You can run docker stacks with external IPs, no? I run all mine from Unraid, through Dockhand as compose stacks, with some ports on the host, others as external IPs on VLANs. But yes, like you I would actually like to move them to VMs so it’s easier to backup, and service, without taking the host server offline.

It starts to get like Inception levels of depth on VMs and hosts!

Take from this anything of use to you: I syncthing my important Unraid server stuff to a MacBook running Backblaze with a 14TB external drive. DNS is handled by NextDNS in the cloud anyway, so it’s just Immich and other random family oriented services for me. I use Pangolin for exposed services.

You could use syncthing (or Resilio) over a tailscale or headscale network or whateveritispeopleuse to a remote PC.

My Docker compose files and VMs are backed up once a week via plugins on Unraid, which of course get duped via syncthing to the MacBook.

I did try a Hetzner Storage Box for a while to replace Backblaze, but the hassle of having to keep an eye on the syncing was a pain and I fell back in to Backblaze on the MacBook as it’s a set and forget (as long as they don’t change the filetypes ignored…). I may go back to a Storage Box again.

I do also want to look into redundancy with a spare server though so it becomes quicker/easier to get it all up and running in event of failure. This is where selfhosting starts getting serious!

Just chucking this out there to help with the fediverse.