Why Home Labs Drift into Complexity (and How to Fix It)

There's this quiet moment after your Proxmox install is finally done — the VMs are humming, containers are behaving, the dashboard's glowing green, and you think, "This is it. I've made it." Fast-forward a few weeks, maybe months, and suddenly you're staring into a digital mess that looks more like a pot of spaghetti than a finely tuned virtualization system. And if that's you, you're not alone. Welcome to the Proxmox experience — or, more broadly, the "home lab syndrome." It starts clean. It never stays that way. ## The VM That Did Too Much In a now-iconic post, one user laid it all out: a single VM juggling five unrelated services, a swarm of mystery LXCs, backup snapshots piling up like hoarded supplies for a virtual apocalypse — and the sinking feeling that one power outage might turn the whole operation into e-waste. Sound familiar? It should. Because this is exactly how a lot of Proxmox (and home lab) setups evolve. It's not about bad hardware or buggy software. It's about unchecked enthusiasm — the same kind that makes you install a Minecraft server "just to see if it works" and end up hosting a half-dozen persistent game worlds. But let's not confuse chaos with failure. In fact, this mess is almost a rite of passage. ## From Minimalist to Mayhem Most home labbers start with a noble goal: consolidate workloads, reduce power draw, learn infrastructure the hard way. Proxmox makes this easy. It's sleek, flexible, and shockingly stable for what it does. But it also gives you just enough rope to tangle yourself in. You create a VM. Then another. "This one's just temporary," you tell yourself. You spin up an LXC because it's lighter. You forget what it does. You clone it "just in case." You take backups religiously — but never delete old ones. A few months later, your disk space is disappearing like socks in a dryer. And now you're scared to reboot anything. One misstep and the mystery LXC running your DNS might vanish, and suddenly nothing works. ## Spaghetti Happens. But Why? So why do home labs spiral out like this? Based on what dozens of experienced users shared, here's the real breakdown: ### 1. Lack of Documentation Almost every seasoned voice echoed this: write stuff down. It sounds simple. It isn't. One user summed it up: "You didn't document anything for your future self." And they're right. When you're in the flow, documenting feels like a waste of time. But future-you — the one debugging broken PCI passthrough at 2am — would kill for a Markdown file. Many recommend tools like Trilium or BookStack, or even just using Proxmox's built-in notes section on each VM. The trick? Write everything down. IPs, usernames, weird bash flags, why that container even exists. ### 2. Too Many Roles, Not Enough Boundaries Running five roles on one VM feels smart until you forget what those roles even are. Most seasoned users have shifted toward "one service per container," naming them after their role (e.g., nas, primary-dns, homeassistant) and tagging by environment (e.g., prod, dev, test). This isn't just about looking neat. It's about survival. If something breaks, you know exactly where to look. ### 3. No "Infrastructure as Code" Mindset Manual configuration might feel faster — until it isn't. Tools like Ansible, Terraform/OpenTofu, or NixOS allow you to declaratively define your setup. One user said they hadn't SSH'd into a VM in ages — because everything from provisioning to package installs is in their Ansible roles. One nuke-and-redeploy later, and they're back in business. ### 4. Backups That Never Die Backups are crucial. Hoarding them? Less so. Proxmox offers backup retention settings — use them. Validate your backups, but don't let them pile up until you're rationing disk space like it's 1999. As one user pointed out, "You're better off snowed under than wiped out," but the key is managed snow. ## The Calm After the Chaos Some users embrace the mess. One even joked about loving their chaotic setup — because even if it's cluttered, they know how to navigate it. There's nothing inherently wrong with digital clutter. The problem starts when you can't trust your setup anymore. That gut-level fear of rebooting your Proxmox node? That's your system crying out for some structure. ## Building Smarter, Not Bigger Eventually, the mess becomes motivation. Many users shared how they rebuilt from scratch — this time, with naming conventions, clear container roles, documentation, and versioned playbooks synced to GitHub. One person even runs a Wiki.js container just for their own infrastructure notes. Their rationale? "If the server explodes, I still have the docs." The same goes for tags and visual cues — Proxmox 9.1 now lets you perform bulk actions based on VM tags. Color-coding, naming standards, tagging by OS or IP — these are small steps that make a huge difference over time. ## You're Not Doing It Wrong Here's the secret: your setup isn't cursed. It's just growing. Like any good lab, things will break, evolve, get weird, and — hopefully — get better with every rebuild. If your Proxmox setup feels like a spaghetti monster, that's not a sign of failure. That's proof of experimentation. The key is learning when to hit pause, clean up, and maybe even start over — this time with a little more intention. So go ahead: name your containers, write some notes, nuke that old backup. Your future self will thank you.