Hello everyone.
I have been interested in starting to self-host, and I have just been able to set up the first useful thing for myself (apart from a PiHole that I have running).
Since I am very afraid of making security mistakes, I would like to get feedback from you if my setup is secure or not.
The simple use case: I want to be able to back up files from my main computer to a hard disk, without having the hard disk attached to my main computer.
The setup:
- A Raspberry Pi 4 running Raspberry Pi OS Lite (64-bit).
- The Raspberry Pi can only be accessed via
ed25519key. - I configured a firewall on the Raspberry Pi with
ufwto allow only traffic from the local subnet. - I then use
sshfsto mount the hard disk connected with the Raspberry Pi to my main computer. - I plan to use
rsyncto back up my files.
Now I need your help: how secure is this setup? Did I make any major mistake? Is there something I could do better?
I’d be happy to get some feedback… 🙂


Generally speaking it will be fine. SSH will also refuse keys with open permissions so you would notice if it was wide-open to other users of the device.
But you know if you are running random code or AI harnesses as that user it can be at risk. Or if you copy around the key all over the place it is more likely to leak. But generally speaking you are secure by default, just don’t do something dumb with the key and you’ll have no problems.