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I've written a series of blog posts about a "hands-off" self-hosting setup intended for relative beginners.
(cyclicircuit.prose.sh)
this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2025
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This is very cool, but also very dangerous. Many projects release versions that need some sort of manual intervention to be updated, and automatically updating to new versions on docker can lead to data loss in those situations.
Here’s a recent example from Immich:
https://github.com/immich-app/immich/releases/tag/v1.133.0
It is my humble opinion that teaching newbies to do automatic updates will cause them to lose data and break things, which will probably sour them from ever self hosting again.
Automatic OS updates are fine, and docker update notifications are fine, but automatic docker updates are just too dangerous.
That's reasonable, however, my personal bias is towards security and I feel like if I don't push people towards automated updates, they will leave vulnerable, un-updated containers exposed to the web. I think a better approach would be to push for backups with versioning. I forgot to add that I am planning a "backups with Syncthing" article as well, I will take this into consideration, add it to the article, and use it as a way to demonstrate recovery in the event of such an issue.
My experience after 35 years in IT: I've had 10x more outages caused by automatic updates than everything else combined.
Also after 35 years of running my own stuff at home, and practically never updating anything, I've never had an outage caused by a lack of updates.
Let's not act like auto updates is without risk. Just look at how often Microsoft has to roll out a fix for something an update broke. Inexperienced users are going to be clueless when an update breaks something.
We should be teaching new people how to manage systems, this includes proper update checks on a cycle, with appropriate validation that everything works afterwards, and the ability to roll back if there's an issue.
This isn't an Enterprise where you simply can't manually manage updates across hundreds or thousands of servers, and tens of thousands of workstations - this is a single admin, small environment.
I do monthly update checks, update where I feel it's warranted, and verify systems afterwards.
Well, you just saved me a bunch of time trying to figure out how to auto-update my humble little server. Granted, I only have Plex and Samba Share right now, but I like the principle. Hell, an update once blanked my smb config file for whatever reason
Now auto-backups are another thing; because I would like to use a .tar file, but then it leads me down a rabbit hole because I don't know how to repair Grub if needed for a restore, or what Grub really even is vs Bios... I've just been learning as I go
I'm a few weeks away from getting a couple parts for an upgrade, and then it'll be some fun. I want to redo it from scratch and maybe set up proxmox and change my file system to zfs, then start looking at docker, figure out Jellyfin and look at some ARR stuff... maybe tailscale or headscale. Idk, it's just fun cause it's a hobby. I just haven't had the storage or ram really, but soon