I just did it not long a ago. Gittea -> Forgejo10 -> Forgejo11 LTS, in Docker. Surprisingly quick, painless and smooth.

(My only issue was not Forgejo, but MySQL. Because the hardware is ancient and Docker compose pulled down a new version of mysql8 at the same time as pulling forgejo. New version of mysql8 didnt support my CPU architecture. Easy fix was to change the label mysql8oraclelinux7 in Docker compose and pull that image. There is a issue with solutions in the MySQL Docker GitHub repo)

Ugh, that ending crossing the line, so close!

Can attest that Folder Sync is excellent. I use it all day (in the background) for two-way sync (notes) and backup of photos videos etc

Though a small PSA on setting up:
I once set up a new share on a new phone with two-way sync, and the app decided to sync the (newer) empty directory to the server (i.e. delete everything) instead of pulling the files from the server to the phone.
Easy fix: Restore notes from backup (step 0: have backups in the first place), then do an initial 1-way sync from server to phone, then change the sync job to two-way.

There’s nothing wrong with Mint, it’s solid. If it works for you don’t stress about it

The only thing is that it’s based on Ubuntu LTS so it’s packages can be a bit old. Doesn’t really matter much unless you have very new hardware and need the hardware support. Then something Fedora based like Bazzite would be better.

For getting newer software you can use flatpak/Flathub.

Bazzite is also “immutable” which makes it harder to break on a system level, but also harder to tinker on a system level. Mint is a “normal” distribution in that regard. Mint does have Timeshift for taking system level snapshots, on the off chance that an update or your tinkering breaks something. Its worth checking that Timeshift is set up for automatic snapshots

Do you version your compose files in git? If so, how does that work with the dockGE workflow?

I highly recommend you use Proxmox as the base OS. Proxmox makes it easy to spin up virtual machines, and easy to back up and revert to backups. So you’re free to play around and try stupid stuff. If you break something in your VM, just restore a backup.

In addition to virtual machines, Proxmox also does “LXC containers” , which are system level containers. They are basically a very light weight virtual machine, with some caveats like running the same kernel as the host.

Most self-hosting software is released as a docker-image. Docker is application level containers, meaning only the bare minimum to run the application is included. You don’t enter a docker container to update packages, instead you pull down a new version of the image from the author.

There are 3 ways to run docker on Proxmox:

• Install docker inside a virtual machine (recommended).
• Install docker inside a LXC Containers (not recommended because of various edge cases)
• Install docker directly on the Proxmox host (not recommended for various reasons).
• (There is ongoing work for running docker images directly in Proxmox, this is in beta/preview since Proxmox 9.1).

The “overhead” of running docker inside a VM on the host is so negligible, you don’t need to worry about it.

I had never heard of dockge before, but this sounds like the killer feature for me:

File based structure - Dockge won’t kidnap your compose files, they are stored on your drive as usual. You can interact with them using normal docker compose commands

Does that mean I can just point it at my existing docker compose files?
My current layout is a folder for each service/stack , which contains docker-compose.yaml + data-folders etc for the service. docker-compose and related config files are versioned in git.
I have portainer, but rarely use it , and won’t let it manage the configuration, because that interfered with versioning the config in git.

The article introduction is gold:

In the unlikely case that you have very little RAM and a surplus of video RAM, you can use the latter as swap.

Also its probably a lot easier to handle for performing testing on equal conditions through the tests for all their cards. Sounds like ideally they want to freeze all their versions for at least a quarter of a year or more

I think Mint does this out of the box, but check if Timeshift is set up for automatic backups. It’s meant for system-level snapshots (basically everything outside the HOME-folder), so you can easily revert if an update or something breaks the system.

Also consider some form of periodic external backup of her files and documents in the home folder, to protect against hardware failure.

Oh good point, these are modern times, exFAT is a thing now.

I remember years ago having issues that Ubuntu could mount exFAT, so avoided it ever since. But that was many years ago, with an old kernel.

Word of warning on “Safe removal” of external harddrives: You really want to click “Eject” or “Safe removal” every time before unplugging. This is much more important than on Windows, due to the way Linux handles buffers and caching. A copy operation will be “finished” but still live in the write-cache and not securely written to disk.

NTFS is no problem (But as mentioned earlier in the thread the permission system is different). I usually format all my external devices with NTFS so they’ll work on both Linux and Windows machines without any fuss.

Thanks for sharing! TIL about autofs. Now I’m curious to try NFS again.

What’s the failure mode if the NFS happens to be offline when PBS initiates a backup? Does PNS try to backup anyway? What if the NFS is offline while PBS boots?

EDIT: What was the reason for bind mounting the NFS share via the host to the container, and NFS mounting from NAS to host?
I did the NFS-mount directly in the PBS. (But I am running my PBS as a VM, so had to do it that way)

I run PBS as a virtual machine on Proxmox, with a dedicated physical harddrive passed through to PBS for the data.

While this protects from software failures of my VMs, it does not protect from catastrophic hardware failure. In theory I should be able to take the dedicated harddrive out and put it in any other system running a fresh PBS, but I have not tested this.

I tried running the same PBS with an external NFS share, but had speed and stability issue, mainly due to the hardware of the NFS host. And I wasn’t aware of autofs at the time, so the NFS share stayed disconnected

Story time?