The only thing you need to worry about is turning on battery conservation to protect the battery, or removing the battery entirely if your laptop doesn’t support that. Because if you have it plugged in and the battery is at 100% all the time, it’s going to go bad quickly. Bad batteries can sometimes swell up, which could turn into a fire hazard.

I’ve never had iOS shut my VPN off, and I use a kill switch so I would immediately know.

Ah, you should perhaps look into using Cloudflare or a similar service. Not for the certificate, but because if somebody took a dislike to your instance, they could easily DDoS you off the internet. The decade long certificate is just icing on the top.

Why would you be using a cloudflare tunnel to stream media? You can do that just fine using any reverse proxy.

Are you using cloudflare to proxy the server? If so, just download a 10-year certificate and don’t worry about renewing short term ones.

Unraid absolutely is a backup. That’s the whole point of the OS. And furthermore , the backup can be backed up at any time and stored on another device, allowing you to restore the entire OS and its configuration. And by “lose the entire device”, I’m assuming you mean the OS is corrupted. At that point, you simply burn a new USB and reconnect the drives, or move them to any other system running Unraid.

Patience, most of all.

Also, backups and notes. The solution you use to host might take care of the backups. For example, I use Unraid, so if any drive fails the system can simulate the data on that drive until I can get it shut down to replace it, and then recreate the data on the new drive.

As for notes, those are important so that you can always know what you’ve done, and what you need to do. That way, if you ever have to do it again, say if you’re setting up another server or replacing one that failed, you know the steps you took to get it set up exactly how you like. It’s also handy because you’ll be doing things like assigning services to ports, and you’ll probably at some point want to know what services are on what ports without going through and checking each one. Things like that are handy things to stick in notes.

Other than that, you don’t need a lot of skills to set something like a home server up. You just need to read the documentation for each service you’re planning to use, and get familiar with how it works.

On my old Dell workstation I pulled out of the dumpster of a local business, which now has a second life as a Unraid NAS, I’m running 29 currently. Used to be running more, but I got rid of some after I was done using those services.

Among other things, the server runs my entire Servarr stack, as well as the various media servers for video, music, ebooks and audiobooks, and my Gitea. There’s a bunch of other stuff as well, but those are the most important to me.

Jellyseer works with Plex as well.

Yes, to both Android and iOS. It uses HTTPS instead of SSH, since most phones don’t support that without additional software.

I personally use the Obsidian Git plugin and sync it to a self-hosted Gitea server. You could also use GitHub or something similar, if you don’t mind them.

I use containers on Firefox to sandbox YouTube, and then have a throwaway account that’s literally just for YouTube and nothing else. Everywhere else on the web, scripts from Google are blacklisted using uBO.

You can’t just ask that. Not without at least taking them out to a fancy dinner first. Maybe a little dancing.