Really glad I made the transition from ESXi to Docker containers about a year ago. Easier to manage too and lighter on resources. Plus upgrades are a breeze. Should have done that years ago…

lol I love it. You’d think by now people/companies would be aware of this…

Any guidance on this? I looked into Synthing at one time to backup Android phones and got overwhelmed very quickly. I’d love to use it in a similar fashion to NextCloud for syncing between various computers too.

No reason why not. May be a little power-hungry depending on the spec but if you already have it go for it. FreeNAS (now TrueNAS) is the usually suggested OS to run: https://www.truenas.com/freenas/

Since you have 4 HDD slots probably run 4 disks in a RAID 5 so think of how much space you need. RAID 5 is n-1 so if you have 4x 10TB drives you will be left with 30TB of space before formatting. You can calculate here: https://www.raid-calculator.com/

Then either mirror the SSDs for OS and caching or just use one. Depends on your budget really.

Nightly backups to an on-prem NAS. Then an rsync to a second off-site NAS at my folks house.

Heh I was also on Google domains before they announced they were selling it. I don’t know what the hell possessed me to register domains with Google. They have a very well documented history of killing off great services. https://killedbygoogle.com/

Cloudflare - largely because they don’t add on extra fees.