I want a single small box that will serve a household of 2-3 people: media streaming (ideally hardware transcoding), Nextcloud for files/photos, and automated backups. I care about low power and low noise, but I also want reliability and versioned backups in case I mess something up. What’s the sweet spot in hardware and software stacks right now, and what are the practical steps to set this up and maintain it?

Here is a 3-tier approach I would consider and would love feedback on:

• Minimal/Low power: Raspberry Pi 5, 8GB RAM, 1TB NVMe on USB-C adapter for system, 4-8TB external HDD for cold backups. Software: Docker + docker-compose, Nextcloud (with external object store if needed), Jellyfin instead of Plex for OSS, Restic or Borg for encrypted backups, rclone for offsite copies. Good for streaming direct play and light use, but expect limited or no reliable transcoding for multiple simultaneous streams.

• Mid-range (recommended for most people): Intel NUC or small Mini-PC with an Intel i5 (10th gen or newer) or AMD Ryzen 5, 16GB RAM, 1TB NVMe OS, 2x HDDs (4-8TB) for media + periodic mirrored backups. Use hardware transcoding (Intel QuickSync) with Jellyfin or Plex. Software stack: Docker, Traefik reverse proxy + Let’s Encrypt, Nextcloud + MariaDB + Redis, Borg/Restic for local snapshots and encrypted offsite to S3/Backblaze via rclone. Add Unattended-upgrades or watchtower for containers, fail2ban, and Netdata for monitoring.

• Small rack/server level: used HP MicroServer or a small tower with ECC support, ZFS on Linux or TrueNAS SCALE if you prefer an appliance. Run VMs/containers so you can isolate services. Use RAID1 or RAIDZ for redundancy but remember RAID is not a backup substitute.

Concrete maintenance checklist / mini-guide:

1. Follow 3-2-1 backup rule: 3 copies, 2 media types, 1 offsite. Local fast backup (snapshots), local cold copy (external rotated drive), offsite encrypted copy (rclone to cloud).
2. Init restic example: restic init -r /path/to/repo ; restic backup /data ; restic forget --keep-daily 7 --keep-weekly 4 --prune
3. Networking: use DHCP reservation or a static IP, set up a reverse proxy (Traefik) so you only expose ports 80/443, or use a tunnel like Cloudflare Tunnel if you hate port forwarding. Always use TLS.
4. Security: run containers as unprivileged where possible, use strong passwords and app-specific passwords for Nextcloud, enable 2FA for accounts, enable fail2ban, and keep updates automated.
5. Power: get a small UPS to gracefully handle outages. Test restores quarterly so backups are actually usable.

Questions for the crowd: has anyone pushed Raspberry Pi 5 to the point of reliable transcoding for a household of 2-3 people? Is hardware acceleration with Intel QuickSync in Jellyfin/Plex still the easiest path? Any gotchas with rclone + restic workflows or with running Nextcloud in Docker on low-RAM devices?