Let’s be honest - in this community NAS means “my do-everything server that may have a RAID and probably also shares storage”.

All my systems are backed up with “rsnapshot” to a file server. File server is backed up to backblaze with duplicacy.

🤣

I have a cron job set to run on Monday and Friday nights, is this too frequent?

Only you can answer that - what is your risk tolerance for data loss?

You’re not going to run deepseek r1 without GPUs (plural).

I’m also considering UnRaid instead of Proxmox for a NAS OS.

NAS just has no meaning anymore?

Ah - I gotcha. That’s some terrible luck with drives.

This is why I do my first-level of backups with rsnapshot. It backs up to the plain filesystem using rsync and uses hard-links to de-dup between backups. No special filesystem, no encryption, restore is just an ‘rsync’ away.

“Wankpanzer” is the one I’ve been going with.

As a general rule: One system, one service. That system can be metal, vm, or container. Keeping things isolated makes maintenance much easier. Though sometimes it makes sense to break the rules. Just do so for the right reasons and not out of laziness.

Your file server should be it’s own hardware. Don’t make that system do anything else. Keeping it simple means it will be reliable.

Proxmox is great for managing VMs. Your could start with one server, and add more as needed to a cluster.

It’s easy enough to setup wireguard for roaming systems that you should. Make a VM for your VPN endpoint and off you go.

I’m a big fan of automation. Look into ansible and terraform. At least consider ansible for updating all your systems easily - that way you’re more likely to do it often.