Stop putting off these 3 infrastructure projects your homelab needs (September 4 - 6)

Published Sep 3, 2026, 8:30 AM EDT Patrick Campanale has been in the tech space for well over a decade, specializing in PC/gaming news and reviews, as well as maker-focused products to build small businesses. With a start in technology back in 2010 surrounding the Palm/webOS ecosystem, Patrick spent his formative years developing mobile applications as well as blogging for various publications, eventually leading to starting his own website in 2014. After running a technology blog for a few years, he stepped out of that role and into the world of high-end custom PC manufacturing and building, with a focus on YouTube video production and overclocking. Then, six years ago, Patrick joined the 9to5Toys team as an editor/writer/reviewer with over 14,000 articles being published there there, ranging from deals and roundups to in-depth reviews on the latest technology, video games, 3D printers, and more. In his free time, Patrick loves to create projects from wood using various robots and methods, including leveraging the technologies of CNCs and lasers. If Patrick isn't working on a computer or playing video games, he's likely in his 2-car garage workshop creating something unique. In addition to all this, Patrick is also a youth pastor at his local church where he feels God has called him to serve, and he loves every minute of it. Are you ready to take your homelab to the next level? This weekend, you should definitely deploy at least one of these three homelab infrastructure projects. They might not be glamorous, but they're sure useful. Make backups simple with Backrest You need to stop putting off setting up your homelab's backups Backups are absolutely crucial for your homelab—ask me how I know. Backrest is designed to make backing up your server simple. Backrest is a browser-based interface and scheduler for restic, which normally requires terminal commands to configure. Backrest's design is to make restic more approachable for those who might not be as comfortable in the command line. It offers screens for creating backup repositories, defining the backup plan, browsing snapshots, restoring files, and monitoring operations in general. The browser-based Backrest interface can also help you schedule your retention policies, handle pruning and integrity checks, and also provide notifications. If you've been wanting a way to get encrypted, deduplicated backups without having to use shell scripts, cron, and terminal commands, Backrest is built for that. Backrest is just the backup layer though. You still need somewhere to send those backups. Each repository will require its own destination, which can include local storage, SFTP, Backblaze B2, Google Cloud Storage, or even an rclone remote. You simply need to deploy Backrest with Docker, but make sure to explicitly mount every source directory that you want to back up. One option would be to mount the root folder of your shares so that way all sub folders of the shares are available to Backrest, though that does add a bit of a security hole should Backrest get compromised. Make sure that repository passwords and storage credentials are stored securely though. Don't make them easy to guess, but make sure you can still recall them with a password manager or something similar, as losing those passwords means losing access to the entire backup for that repository. Create your own homelab passkey authentication stack with Pocket ID Stop typing passwords in to log into your homelab applications Credit: Pocket ID Are you tired of remembering or storing tons of different passwords for your homelab applications? Well, Pocket ID is here to save the day. Designed to work as a self-hosted OpenID Connect and OAuth 2.0 identity provider, you can use Pocket ID to manage your logins in a very different way than just normal passwords. You simply authenticate to Pocket ID with your device's PIN, biometric security, security key, or a passkey stored in a password manager, then Pocket ID handles authenticating you to the homelab app itself. The best way to think about Pocket ID is a central login authority for applications that already support OpenID Connect. It's not designed to replace every single application's login screen, but many apps already support OIDC, such as Immich, Proxmox, Grafana, Nextcloud, Paperless-ngx, Audiobookshelf, Unraid and Synology DSM, Portainer, and even WordPress. Deploying Pocket ID is simple with Docker, and it's just a single container that needs to run on your network. It does need HTTPS and typically a domain too, so make sure you have those capabilities before trying to spin it up. Just make sure that the container storage is local to your host, because SQLite doesn't like working on remote NFS or SMB shares. You don't need a Synology NAS to easily give other users file access to your server Credit: SFTPGo Normally, accessing your homelab's files externally requires a VPN and NFS or SMB mounting your storage shares. Or, you could use an app like File Browser to access the files via a web interface. However, all of those solutions only allow you to access the files, and make it difficult to share files or folders with others. SFTPGo is a great way to offer managed sharing of your files with others. For instance, if you run a custom NAS, Unraid, or even a UGREEN NAS and want to share files with a remote video or photo editor, then SFTPGo is one of the best and easiest ways to do that. SFTPGo isn't just a FTP protocol, it actually exposes SFTP and SCP over SSH, a browser-based file client, both FTP and FTPS, and even WebDAV while applying the same users, permissions, quotas, and storage mapping across all methods. There are two portions of SFTPGo—the administration side, and the file access side. As the administrator, you'll create accounts, select what storage quota each user has, and then configure what access the users have to different folders on your NAS. At the end of the day, SFTPGo is just a great way to give access to your NAS if the operating system doesn't natively have a good external access setup like Synology or QNAP. SFTPGo deploys as a single Docker container, though you will need two port forwards for it to work externally, as well as some form of HTTPS proxy or Cloudflare Tunnel. Setting up infrastructure might not be fun, but it's sometimes necessary Sometimes homelab projects are fun and glamorous—other times they're boring but necessary. Today's projects focus on that second category. Setting up backups is never fun, but it's better to have them configured before a major disaster happens in your homelab. Configuring passwordless authentication isn't glamorous, but it does make accessing your server that much simpler. Finally, configuring external access to your files might not seem important right now, but it could be crucial in the future, so it's better to have the infrastructure in place before you need it so you can properly test it and figure everything out ahead of time.