The backing database type and the storage it runs on are just as important too.

Welcome to the world of VPNs.

After 5 years I got laid off and had to rebuild mine, using a template from a "professional" that I hired like 7-9 years ago. I'll definitely use this to update mine!

Whoa, just when I thought I had completed my setup haha

After using Nginx for almost a decade, Caddy is pretty damn awesome regarding how simple it is. I don't need 8-10 lines of code to setup an SSL secured reverse proxy, I need three.

If you want to use a cloud provider, then your main problem will be uploading this much data and then downloading it back again, both price and time wise.

If you happen to have a symmetric gig pipe (or larger) that definitely helps :) I currently have 27 TBs in the cloud, for most of it, it was just easier to re-download it since the cloud VM had a 10 gig pipe compared to my gig down and 30 Mbps up (cries in Comcast...I moved and now I have access to AT&T fiber at up to 5 Gbps, its like $250/month though). I thnk I'm gonna move everything back locally, doing everything in the cloud was a temporary solution for when I lived with my parents for a few months. They weren't too happy about the electricity bill of my 15 HDD, 8 NVME drive, 2x10G nic, 128 GB ECC, 1KW PSU running a Threadripper 2970wx, liquid cooled of course ...and then having the AC running 24/7 to keep i cool. I had all of that crammed in a 4U server, which was pared down from my larger on which I was using at my other apartment.

with could storage I find I'm able to download large files from the webUI, but I could attach the bucket and just get the data from here.

I have like 7tb of data on my current raid array, and in the future, I plan to wipe it and make it ZFS, with 3 additional 7tb drives. I'd like to not lose all the data. I'm sure I can't be the only one who has this issue. What do you guys use for temporary backup solution, while repurposing your HW.

Realize I have no way to backup 10s of TBs, cry, destroy my ZFS pool and start over. 90% of my stuff is media which I can easily reacquire from Usenet in about 1.5-2 weeks of 24/7 downloading. So, not really a hassle, it just takes forever.

If you have good upload bandwidth (like if you're on fiber and have a 1 gig upload) IDriveE2.com has pretty reasonable pricing, it's object storage (think S3) not block storage (any normal filesystem) though, but if you're just using it for a backup that shouldn't matter. I apparently got in right before they doubled their prices and got 50 TB for a year for $500. They have "on demand pricing" which is more expensive than their yearly plans, but it's currently $4/TB/month so that would only cost you like $30...assuming you can upload all your data to their servers.

Much more to learn…

I've been at this for over a decade and there's always more to learn! If you haven't checked out docker-compose yet, that's your next step. It allows you to script container setups :) I have 5 compose files based on categories (pirating, media servers, admin, etc...) and a shell script to launch them if I want to install them all, otherwise I just call the specific compose file. I can have all my apps up and running on a new server in about 10 minutes. Docker is awesome when it works well.

I've been doing this for so long on my own that I always forget that all these awesome things exist. Thanks.