1. VM running on a proxmox host. Tips: make sure you know your backups are in a state you can restore data from them.
2. Nightly backup via proxmox to Hetzner Storage box with 2 day retention. I’d like a local copy too but I don’t currently have hardware for it.
3. Don’t know. Personally I have a DNAT rule on firewall and my instance is directly open to the internet. You might not want that and I might not recommend it, but right now, for me, it works. I’d need to look in a VPN solution for android I could replace the current ‘open for all’ situation.

And don’t you dare to forget wear a very nice suit and say thank you to everyone you see.

Actual shortage. Performance drops significantly when zfs doesn’t have enough memory. It might have been an option to tweak configuration for zfs pools, add SSD for caching and so on, but I needed to change drive configurations anyways for other reasons so for me it was easier to drop zfs and switch to software raid.

How much RAM your system has? Zfs is pretty hungry for memory and if you don’t have enough it’ll have quite significant impact on performance. My proxmox had 7x4TB drives on zfs pool and with 32 gigs of RAM there was practically nothing left for the VMs under heavy i/o load.

I switched the whole setup to software raid, but it’s not offically supported by proxmox and thus managing it is not quite trivial.

I mostly use battlestar galactica ship names for my own hardware, but it’s been mixed with boring ‘<function>.mydomain.foo’ names as well. I should rename a bunch of stuff around and include them in my DNS.