What is the minimum backup for a home server?
The data volumes and the compose files, nothing else. Containers are rebuildable; the database and the uploads are not. A nightly restic snapshot to a second machine plus a weekly copy offsite covers the realistic failure modes: disk death, deletion, and theft.
Simplest way to get HTTPS in front of a few home services?
Caddy, because certificate handling is the default rather than a plugin:
archive.example.com {
reverse_proxy 127.0.0.1:8080
encode zstd gzip
}
That is the entire configuration, certificates included. The equivalent nginx setup is four times longer and needs a separate renewal timer that fails silently.
Is there a simpler version that gets most of the benefit?
Yes: do the first step, skip the automation, and revisit in a month. Most of the value is in the first step, and most of the cost is in making it repeatable before you know it is right.