We moved house three weeks ago. Most people's moving-day anxiety is about the piano, or the cat, or whether the new place's oven is the size it looked in the photos. Mine was about a half-height rack, a NAS with several terabytes of data I would genuinely cry to lose, and the small matter of keeping the family's photos and the household DNS alive across two addresses and an indeterminate gap in broadband.
I want to write this down partly so I remember it, and partly because every guide to "the perfect homelab" assumes the thing stays still forever. Mine does not. It has now moved twice, and the second time was a great deal less stupid than the first, so there is hope.
the bit everyone forgets: the internet leaves before you do
The single biggest lesson is that your broadband at the new place is not ready when you arrive, and your broadband at the old place dies the moment the engineer flips a switch, which is rarely the moment you expect. There was a four-day window where I had no fixed line at either address. Everything I run that the household actually depends on, DNS, the photo backups, the calendar, was suddenly homeless.
So the first thing I did, a fortnight before the van, was make a list of what the family would notice if it went away for a week. It was shorter than I feared. DNS, because nothing works without it and nobody forgives you. Photos, because they are irreplaceable. The calendar, because my wife runs the family on it and I run on the family. Everything else, the media server, the monitoring, the half-finished projects, could be down for a month and the only person who would notice was me.
That list is the whole plan, really. Everything that mattered got a temporary home that did not depend on my rack being plugged in: DNS moved to a cheap cloud instance for a tenner, photos got a verified offsite copy before a single cable came out, and the calendar was already hosted properly because I learned that lesson a previous move ago.
backups, and then the backup of the backup
I do not trust a move. Vans get into accidents, boxes get dropped, and a NAS is a box full of spinning rust that hates being jostled and hates being upside down. So before anything was unplugged I did the thing I always preach and rarely do with enough discipline: I took a fresh, full, verified backup to a drive that travelled in the car with me, on my lap, not in the van.
Verified is the word doing the work there. An unverified backup is a rumour. I actually restored a handful of files from it onto a laptop and checked they opened, because the day you discover your backup is corrupt should never be the day you need it. I have been the person staring at a tar archive that will not extract. I do not wish to be him again.
The NAS itself I powered down cleanly, let the disks spin all the way down, and packed in its original-ish box with foam, treating it like the fragile thing it is. The rack gear came out node by node, each labelled with masking tape and a marker, because future-me at the new place at eleven at night does not remember which Cat6 went where and present-me owes him the courtesy.
the reassembly, and what bit me
At the new place I deliberately did not rush. The temptation is to plug everything in at once and bask in the blinkenlights, but that way lies a tangle you cannot debug. I brought up the network first: switch, then the one machine that does DHCP and DNS, then proved a laptop could get an address and resolve a name. Only then did I add the NAS, and only then everything else.
Two things bit me anyway. The first was that the new flat's wiring put the only sensible spot for the rack a long way from the master socket, so I spent an afternoon I had not budgeted running a cable along the skirting and pretending I was a professional. The second was that one of the drives in the NAS came up reporting a handful of reallocated sectors that were not there before the move. It was probably the journey. The array rebuilt onto a spare without drama, precisely because it was a redundant array and not a single disk full of hope, and I have since replaced the questionable drive. That is the entire argument for redundancy in one paragraph: the move did real damage, and I did not lose a byte.
what i would do differently
Next time, and there is always a next time, I would arrange the temporary cloud DNS earlier and test the cutover before moving day rather than under pressure with a screwdriver in my teeth. I would also accept, sooner than I did, that the homelab can simply be off for the messy middle of a move. I spent energy keeping things alive that nobody needed alive. The family needs DNS, photos and the calendar. The rest is my hobby, and my hobby can wait a weekend.
There is also a softer lesson buried in all of this, about scope. A homelab grows by accretion. You add a service because it is interesting, and another because the first one needed it, and a third because a blog post made it sound clever, and one day you are moving house and discover you have built a small business's worth of infrastructure to serve a household of three. The move forced me to sort the load-bearing from the decorative, and that sorting was healthy. I have since retired two services I was keeping alive purely out of sunk-cost affection, and the lab is leaner and easier to reason about for it.
The other thing a move teaches you is how good your documentation actually is, which in my case was "patchy". I had labelled the cables, but I had not written down, anywhere a future panicking me could find it, the order in which things needed to come up or which machine held which role. I have fixed that now, with a single boring text file that says what each box does and what depends on what. It is not glamorous. It would have saved me an hour of staring at blinking lights and trying to remember whether DNS lived on the machine I had already unplugged.
The new place is good. The rack hums away in a cupboard that, miraculously, has ventilation. The coffee is in the same mug it has always been in, which is the only continuity I truly insist upon. And the homelab survived, slightly rattled, having taught me once again that the resilient bit was never the clever software. It was the boring discipline of a verified backup on my lap, a short and honest list of what actually matters, and a text file describing the whole thing for the version of me who will, inevitably, do this all again.