Two small boxes do all the thinking. Neither is loud, neither is exotic, and between them they run the entire household: services on one, AI on the other, with a NAS for bulk storage and a backup chain that leaves the building.
Virtual machines are backed up nightly to a Proxmox Backup Server; the backup store syncs to Dropbox for an offsite copy, and the second site’s machines back up to their own dedicated store. The rule learned the honest way: a mirror mirrors deletions too, so point-in-time backups — not sync — are the layer you actually restore from.
The drives themselves are watched: per-disk temperatures feed Home Assistant, and the house cools its own drives with the living-room aircon when the hot season pushes them too far.
Prometheus scrapes twenty targets across every host and VM — node metrics, GPU, containers, the hypervisors’ own APIs, the firewall and the NAS — and a single Grafana dashboard shows fleet health at a glance. A deterministic Telegram alert path fires on the conditions that actually matter, and the AI appliance additionally keeps a minute-by-minute flight recorder of memory and GPU use, which has caught more than one slow leak before it became an outage.