I’ve recently begun using duplicati to backup the data from my docker containers and VMware snapshots for the guest VM itself, just currently struggling to understand how to automate the snapshots yet so I do them manually

Could you not use something like Tailscale to access it remotely?

I also work in IT and I hate for old things to go to waste so a lot of my Plex server is ‘salvaged’ hard drives from desktops that were collecting dust after the changeover to thin clients.

It’s mostly desktop hardware I run, the only thing that’s remotely ‘server grade’ is the Dell Raid card that came out of a decommissioned server also from work.

Also, if you can then encode your files in MP4 for maximum compatibility across devices and less overhead. Plex is great

How would one securely host this via reverse proxy so bots don’t bring it down?

Reverse engineered N64 games? Can you provide a link?