I’m a good chemist, but not IT advanced. Started using Debian out of the box last year on miniPC. Running Jellyfin only on that local machine. Don’t understand coding, but copy/ paste terminal instructions from trusted sites. Have 1TB music, films and documents. Want to move all photos from Google.
You don’t need many “guides”, especially not on blogs. They are risky - often written by people who don’t really know what they are doing fully and,more importantly, don’t update their guides. Then things can become really really ugly fast.
If you managed to run jellyfin on a miniPC on Debian you are already doing a good job and very likely already quite a bit.
My personal recommendation: Get another miniPC (no ARM,so no Raspi) and put Debian on it. Then use the Proxmox Community scripts to expand your reach, BUT use them as an “understanding how shit works” base - they have their limitations and their quality has sadly dropped since tteck is no longer with us. (RIP :(
That should give you a pretty good insight into virtualisation, KVM, basic networking - and a plattform to play that you easily can revert to an earlier state if you fuck up.
Remember backups, remember documentation (a wiki,maybe netbox) and monitoring (Prometheus/Grafana or Zabbix are some of the multiple options).
If you want to, you can also look into bash scripts to automate a few things. I know people here hate LLMs but actually ChatGPT and perplexity are good for that. Let them write a bash script for some easy tasks (e.g. update the VM, download a configuration file, create two admin users, make them sudo, install zabbix agent, install this and that) and then let them explain step by step to you. They aren’t too bad at it and actually help you learn basic scripting fairly well. (And then learn it properly with a e-course or something.)
As long as you don’t operate any public facing services and proper backups the actual risk involved is fairly small
Thank you, especially so for the relative risk view.
Just another thing: Get proper,WORM(write once read many) backups. Get a M-Disc capable blueray burner (around 100 bucks) and burn the real important stuff in Archive capable Bluerays (normal ones degrade within years,these don’t). You don’t want to find out your datasets suffered from bit rot(yes,that is a thing) 5 years later and have no option to restore because you fucked up backups 2 years ago. For the real important data(everything that can’t be redownloaded aka the personal stuff) it’s worth it.
Ideally do put some of those discs somewhere else,away from your house.