Procedures for a lab you can't afford to lose.

Runbooks, worksheets and scripts I run in my own rack. Backups you have actually restored, monitoring that doesn't train you to ignore alerts, and a patch cadence you don't have to reinvent every month.

Most homelab material teaches you how to build it. This is about keeping it running on the day a disk dies, the ISP drops, or you have to bring back a service you last touched eight months ago.

Eight of the 96

The backup audit from the free Homelab Ops Checklist. Tick what you have actually done. Ticks stay in this browser.

0 of 8 done

Three copies of every Tier 1 backup exist right now. You checked the dates, not the job's "success".
Two different media or device types confirmed, not two shares on one array.
One copy is genuinely offsite or offline from production.
At least one copy is immutable or offline, so ransomware and a fat-fingered rm can't reach it.
Retention matches the written policy, for example 7 daily, 4 weekly, 6 monthly.
You can log into the backup tool with restore permissions, not just backup permissions.
A non-production restore target is picked: a scratch VM, a spare disk, an isolated folder.
Credentials live in a password manager, not in a config file or a notes app.

Download the checklist

Available now

The Homelab Ops Handbook

Backup, disaster recovery, monitoring and patching runbooks plus fill-in worksheets. PDF, EPUB, Markdown and the worksheet files, so you can keep them in your own notes or git repo.

$29See what's inside

Proxmox Backup Verification Pack

The monthly restore drill, a read-only cluster backup audit, PBS verify status, and a liveness rule where green means it ran. 28-page runbook, five scripts, three worksheets.

$39See what's inside

Homelab Monitoring Kit

Six Grafana dashboards generated from a small style system, a job liveness guard where green means it ran, and twenty-five alert rules with a written reason for every threshold.

$49See what's inside

Small-Team Onboarding/Offboarding Runbook

Intake form to accounts to audit trail, for Microsoft 365 and Entra ID. 49-page runbook, five Microsoft Graph PowerShell scripts, five worksheets.

$79See what's inside

Agent Ops Toolkit

The five controls I run in front of my own coding agents: a gate that holds what policy did not allow, a kill switch that works from a phone, an evidence ledger you can verify, a liveness guard, and cost routing. MIT code plus a 20-page guide.

$99See what's inside

The handbook, the Proxmox pack and the monitoring kit together as The Homelab Operator bundle, $89. The bundle link goes live with the products.

Who this is for

Homelabbers whose lab now holds something they'd genuinely miss.
Sysadmins who want the drill written down before the outage, not after it.
One-to-three-person IT teams with no runbook library and no time to write one.

Why me

I run a Proxmox and TrueNAS lab that other people's things depend on.
I ran identity provisioning in an enterprise, where a bad procedure had real consequences.
These are the procedures I actually use, not a survey of what the internet recommends.

Get the checklist, hear about the handbook

The free 96-item Homelab Ops Checklist is the short version of the handbook's drills. Take it here and you'll get the handbook link the day it ships.