2 things, one of which has already been said

Get an SSD and a usb cable for it. Boot off that. Be aware that not all cables are the same (have a Google for usb 3 SSD cables for home assistant before you buy one). There’s a little song and dance you have to do to boot off ext SSD but it’s not hard and doesn’t take long (Google).

That combo will eliminate the SD card issues in the future. But you also need to look into the Google Drive backup add-on. Get that for when shit goes down.

With those two things you should be all set and eliminate this ever happening again. If it does you have a backup.

I’ll be honest and say that most of my self hosted music collection was pirated or ripped from CD like 20 years ago. I put it all on an iPod back then.

I found the iPod gathering dust in a drawer when I finally got a car with a usb jack a couple years ago (yeah I’m not exactly laden with bags of cash over here) and recently pulled all that music back onto my newly set up media server.

I have a Spotify family account I’m trying to phase out with resistance from the children.

To support artists I go and see them when they tour and buy a ludicrously expensive t-shirt

Yeah my wife’s Granny would buy me some every year. Then she died and now I don’t get socks at Christmas and it makes me sad. Not because I want socks, I want Granny Babs back

Yeah I know, I use Gluetun now, I was just answering OPs question.

I ran a Linux VM and just had Mullvad app installed and always on, and that was all I needed

Yes

My problem with this solution was that I have signed in to Tailscale via my Google account, and I have to buy Mullvad through Tailscale, linking my Google account to the Mullvad account.

What I wanted to do was have my own Mullvad account and route Tailscale through it, but that wasn’t possible, I had to have Tailscale manage Mullvad, which just didn’t sit right with me.

Yeah the new VM should just draw from your remaining RAM. My Debian VM is only using a few GB (6? 8?) but my Dell (I have a 7050 so it can’t be so different from yours) still has 10gb to play with.

As for the running out of USBs I guess you could run a usb hub to one of the usb ports and just pass through the one, although I don’t know if that would break something.

I don’t think they do a powered usb c to sata but I could be wrong. I’ve used 3/4 of the ports on the back for HDDs, and the remaining one for my ZigBee stick for Home Assistant VM and have one spare (on the front) plus the usb C. I have passed that usb C through to a VM for a usb c to 3.5mm (to send music to speakers) in the past though.

You could try a usb to sata (powered) and a usb c to usb a to plug in to the usb C socket I guess, try that? I have a few usbc-a adapters knocking around the house so if you’re the same you could try it for nothing

I have also got a dell optiplex and Proxmox and a Debian machine with mostly Arr in containers.

I also have 3 old HDDs that I’m using for it, of various sizes (2x1tb and 3/4tb)

I have used a powered usb3 to sata connector to hook them up to the Dell. As in I have 3 usb to sata connectors, and each one also has a plug socket. I’ve got those 3 plus my Dell in a 4 gang extension lead so it’s only using 1 plug socket in my kitchen. They were about £15 each on Amazon.

I have had a gotcha from using usb that destroyed my setup.

I now have a working solution that will stop this happening again:

So I have 3 usb-sata HDDs hooked in via the usb ports. I set up Open Media Vault as a VM. Then I passed through the USB drives to the OMV VM.

Those drives are then shared via SMB (I’ve just added NFS) to everything that needs it via the OMV VM.

I can then access the HDDs via this SMB share in Proxmox for backups if that’s what you wanna do.

Now the reason I’ve done it this way is because originally I had the drives in Proxmox. I gave them names and then put those names in the Fstab of Proxmox. One of the drives “forgot” it’s name and Proxmox wouldn’t then boot because one of its drives wasn’t accessible.

You could get around this by adding an option to the end of your fstab, I think the option is “nofail” but I’m not 100% so just check up on it.

I’ve used this option in my Debian VM Fstab to mount the NAS drives so my Arr stack can see them, and even got my Squeezebox server using them too. I’m using CIFS so I can see the drives on my Windows PC so I can manage the storage on my desktop.

So there you go, usb HDDs with passed through usb sockets to OMV VM is how I do it. If one of the drives fails OMV still runs and I just find I have no media in Plex and have to figure out why my drive isn’t working anymore.

It’s the same reason I like running things in Docker; you can just wake up and read about something while enjoying your morning shit, then switch the computer on and try and boot it before that thing you’re meant to be doing. If you can’t do it you can just delete it and try again later.

I started Self Hosting with Proxmox 4 months ago and so far my only real snafu has been mapping drives directly to Proxmox with Fstab. If you’re gonna do it, add “nofail” FFS.

I pass my drives through to my NAS VM to handle rather than Proxmox because it’s easier to fix my NAS if it fucks up using Proxmox, than to try and fix a none-booting Proxmox.

Anyway now I’m at a point of stability and dim sat thinking about redoing it bare bones, but I love tinkering so I’m sure this is just the plateau before I discover something new to play with, so I’m keeping Proxmox

I’ve had a usb to sata running to a 2.5" sdd that acts as the main storage and boot for my pi4b, and it’s been in use for 4 years with zero issues so far.

I’ve now got 3HDDs attached to my Proxmox machine for NAS storage via usb ATM. It’s been running since Feb. It’s had it’s issues but those were more my fault for not understanding the flake factor (since my experience with the sdd) I had one drive forget what I named it, so my whole Proxmox died.

But that was remedied by passing the USB straight through to OMV.

Just saying, I’ve not really had the same experience as you with them, they seem fine if you have an idea what may fuck up.

I’m currently in the market for a music server myself.

I want it all, I want something that will fire music at my Google home links, and also some raspberry pis with speakers, and also serve to my phone in the house and away from it.

I have Logitech Media Server running ATM and for a long time, but it is, and always has been a bit hot and miss.

I have a music file system in OMV which I can access on my LAN. This is the source of music for LMS. But I also have Plex pointed at it

This allows me to play the same music from any TV or phone with Plex on it. Plex even have an app called Plex Amp. I use Symfonic though, I liked it enough to buy it.

These apps give me the option to cast my audio to the Google Homes minis I have, I need something for my Pis.

Another advantage I recently found of adding my music library to Plex is I downloaded a program called MediaMonkey to stick music on my old iPod that I have in the car. It picked my Plex library up straight away, although to its credit, it also found my original music Share, it just didn’t advertise the fact.

I use Plex myself but there’s Emby and Jellyfin to look into too.

Yeah that’s what the dude said when he was showing us around, blew my preteen brain.

I recently watched an episode of Hamiltons Pharmacopoeia where this lady was talking about her experience living with the guy that made all the LSD for the south of Britain back in the day. She fell in love with a pigeon.

Anyway this dude was well into trepanning, thought it was a way to increase the brain capacity and expand the mind.

She ended up trepanning herself on film and releasing the footage, yeah they watched it on the episode.

She was a bit of an oddball but swears by it.

I’ve self hosted home assistant for a few years, external access through Cloud flare now because it’s been so stablez but previously used DuckDNS which was a bit shit if I’m honest.

I got into self hosting proper earlier this year, I wanted to make something that I could sail the 7 seas with.

I use Tailscale for everything.

The only open port on my router is for Plex because I’m a socialist and like to share my work with my friends.

Just keep it all local and use it at home. If you wanna take some of your media outside with you, download it onto your phone before you leave

Sometimes I iron. Someone mentioned school uniform and yes.

But mainly I look at say a t-shirt and go “Meh” shrug and throw it on. Bang a leather jacket on and nobody knows it’s wrinkled and they fall out.

Now we’re having our 1 week of summer in the UK I’m having to iron my t-shirts because it’s too hot for my jacket, but it’s only a week.

I went to a crypt in Britain as a kid, can’t remember where tf it was, but I still remember it because it was super interesting.

It’s where I learned about Trepanning and how they did it back in olden times to “let the bad spirits out” and it actually worked because it reduced swelling around the brain by giving the blood a way out.

You need to pick a machine (if you only have 1 you don’t lol) to be your web portal, bang a block of code in via ssh or command line (I copy pasted) then you can access Portainer via the web portal.

From there “Stacks” is Docker Compose and you can fiddle with your containers, networking settings and all the other stuff via a UI instead of having to SSH in all the time to look at your compose files.

Then if you wanna use docker on more machines you just bang a block of code into that machine via ssh and it will appear in your Portainer

Far easier imho

I found a lot of the problems I had with Docker were with Docker. Once I moved to using Portainer for Docker it became much more accessible.

This looks like a good shout. I have actually tried it out but it was years ago when I was trying to get a Sonos-like service and ultimately settled on Squeezebox.

Maybe it’s time to try it again, thanks for the idea

It’s a Dell Optiplex 7050