You don't need to rebuild your server from scratch to use Ansible or any other configuration management tool. It helps, though, because then you can ensure you can rebuild from scratch in a fully automatic way.

You can start putting small things in control with Ansible; next time you want to make a change, do it through Ansible. If you stop making manual changes, you'll already get some benefit- like being able to put your Ansible manifests in version control.

(I still use Puppet for configuration files, installing packages, etc. It just does some stuff better than Ansible. Still, Puppet is harder to learn, and Ansible can be more than enough. Plus, there's stuff that Ansible can do that Puppet can't do.)

Dotfiles are a completely separate problem, tackle them separately. Don't use Ansible for that, use a dotfile-specific tool.

And also, you learn to make programs of a given difficulty by making programs of a smaller difficulty first.

Huh, I think you're right.

Before discovering ZFS, my previous backup solution was rdiff-backup. I have memories of it being problematic for me, but I may be wrong in my remembering of why it caused problems.

Thanks! I was not aware of these options, along with what other poster mentioned about --link-dest. These do turn rsync into a backup program, which is something the root article should explain!

(Both are limited in some aspects to other backup software, but they might still be a simpler but effective solution. And sometimes simple is best!)

Ah, I didn't know of this. This should be in the linked article! Because it's one of the ways to turn rsync into a real backup! (I didn't know this flag- I thought this was the main point of rdiff-backup.)

Beware rdiff-backup. It certainly does turn rsync (not a backup program) into a backup program.

However, I used rdiff-backup in the past and it can be a bit problematic. If I remember correctly, every "snapshot" you keep in rdiff-backup uses as many inodes as the thing you are backing up. (Because every "file" in the snapshot is either a file or a hard link to an identical version of that file in another snapshot.) So this can be a problem if you store many snapshots of many files.

But it does make rsync a backup solution; a snapshot or a redundant copy is very useful, but it's not a backup.

(OTOH, rsync is still wonderful for large transfers.)

https://charity.wtf/2021/08/09/notes-on-the-perfidy-of-dashboards/

Graphs and stuff might be useful for doing capacity planning or observing some trends, but most likely you don't need either.

If you want to know when something is down (and you might not need to know), set up alerts. (And do it well, you should only receive "actionable" alerts. And after setting alerts, you should work on reducing how many actionable things you have to do.)

(I did set up Nagios to send graphs to Clickhouse, plotted by Grafana. But mostly because I wanted to learn a few things and... I was curious about network latencies and wanted to plan storage a bit long term. But I could live perfectly without those.)

I run mbsync/isync to keep a maildir copy of my email (hosted by someone else).

You can run it periodically with cron or systemd timers, it connects to an IMAP server, downloads all emails to a directory (in maildir format) for backup. You can also use this to migrate to another IMAP server.

If the webmail sucks, I wouldn't run my own. I would consider using Thunderbird. It is a desktop/Android application. It syncs mail to your desktop/phone, so most of the time, it's working with local storage so it's much faster than most webmails.

That's what I use too. Coupled with soju it's an easier experience for me. And they are both in Debian 13!

I think having a solid/stable virtualization layer is very helpful. Whether that's Proxmox, Incus, or something else, it's a matter of taste.

You can then put NixOS, Guix, Debian, Arch, whatever on top.