Definitely a trade off between energy and security. I have PBS running on an old laptop backed up to Backblaze and wouldn’t change it for anything, though. Proxmox backups are flawless and have saved me so many times. But yeah, 16GB of RAM with that processor is overkill for PBS and will probably consume more energy than is needed.

If everything is Dockerized anyway, you could just skip the step where you backup to PBS and use something like Kopia to backup your Docker volumes to a network share or offsite, rebuilding with compose or whatever if you have an issue.

I think it’s possible to have false-positives. Like gabriele97@lemmy.g97.top said above, do a clear and scrub to see if that helps. It happened to me last month after some really intensive disk i/o and AI stuff and I did that and the drive hasn’t had an issue since.

Additionally, I plugged in one of my old, supposedly faulted drives from last year as an external drive on my desktop to test it out, and it is still working fine months later, so yeah, it appears that there is some possibility for false-positives.

Like another person said, make sure you have good backups and that the other drives are solid, but I’d take a wait-and-see approach.

You can use sendgrid to send your emails. That gets around the port 25 problem, but everyone is right - you’ll have a difficult time getting through spam filters even with them.

I selfhost my own email mainly so I don’t have to go through the Google unsecured apps rigamarole every time I want to set up smtp for one of my services, but no one except protonmail gets it reliably.

https://simplelogin.io/ - they’re now owned by Protonmail, I think, and the service is still great. I have hundreds of alias e-mails with them on a custom domain and they’re as permanent as you want them to be. You can also use their domains to be more anonymous if you want.

I’m not super familiar with how snapshots work, but that seems like a good solution. As I remember, what pushed me to PBS was the ability to make incremental backups to keep them from eating up storage space, which I’m not sure is possible with just the snapshots in Proxmox. I could be wrong, though.

PBS only backs up the VMs and containers, not the host. That being said, the Proxmox host is super-easy to install and the VMs and containers all carry over, even if you, for example, botch an upgrade (ask me how I know…)

Tangentially-related, I’m actually really excited to use Threads’s federation with Mastodon to bring interested friends and family over to Mastodon. If you get all the same benefits (connection, more people) with none of the ads or privacy downsides, then it seems like a no-brainer to join Mastodon over Threads.

But to answer the question, no. I run my own Mastodon (and Lemmy) server. I’m kind of all-in on the fediverse.

Proxmox Backup Server. It’s life-changing. I back up every night and I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve completely messed something up only to revert it in a matter of minutes to the nightly backup. You need a separate machine running it–something that kept me from doing it for the longest time–but it is 100% worth it.

I back that up to Backblaze B2 (using Duplicati currently, but I’m going to switch to Kopia), but thankfully I haven’t had to use that, yet.