I have seen Nix come up quite a bit and have been tempted to try it. I’ve rolled with Arch before so I was considering going back to it but maybe something new be go.

The OS itself I don't back up outside of mirroring. I run an immutable OS (every reboot is like a fresh install). I can redeploy from git so no need to backup. I have some persistent BTRFS volumes mounted where logs, caches, and state go. Don't backup, but I swap the volume every boot and keep the last 30 days of volumes or a min of at least 10 for debugging.

Something like this has always interested me. I remember reading about doing similar with Windows. Not so much it being immutable so much as having a decent starting image that you load on any device you want with all your programs ready to go.

Runs Arrs, Jellyfin, Monero node, Tor entry node, wireguard VPN (to get into network from remote), I2C, Mullvad VPN (default), Proton VPN (torrents with port forwarding use this), DNS (forced over VPN using DoT), PiHole in front of that, three of my WiFi vlans route through either Mulvad, I2C, or Tor. I'll use TailsOS for anything sensitive. WiFi is just to get to I2C or Onion sites where I'm not worried about my device possibly leaking identity.

Do you have a guide or ten you used for all this perchance? Unraid has stuff like trashguides and space invader one. Especially the DNS part onwards? If not it’s cool I have Mullvad set up and Pihole with my current setup so I’ll be able to work it out. This is all very compelling for me to try out (I should really have learned about wireguard by now). Thanks a lot for such an interesting and informative write up!