All great points! Allow us to add a few... mainly our epic huge guide that itself involves about a dozen more other guides inside it.

We also have our How To Build A Sexy Umbrel Node For $300 guide that uses our considerable IT building experience to recommend targeted upgrades to the default suggested parts list from Umbrel.

These upgrades will make your node more stable, last loner and most importantly, sexier. Finally, as Umbrel heavily encourages "being your own cloud", we'll also point out these two important issues:

When you first use Umbrel you’ll quickly notice that it doesn’t use encryption. The URL will read like “http” not “https”. This means that anything you send, including passwords, files and more will be sent in clear text for anyone to read.

Even across the Tor network, it doesn’t fully secure your data as the Tor exit node (which can be run by anyone) is what decrypts the Tor data and forwards it onto your node. That exit node can thus see anything that’s in clear text which is again, any password or files you send.

Tor also doesn’t provide data integrity or confidentiality meaning someone in the middle can alter your data and perform man-in-the-middle attacks. Full, end to end TLS 1.3 encryption solves all this which is why you normally see sites using “HTTPS” in their URL.

While Umbrel doesn’t try to hide this security issue (they state it in their security.md file), it’s a big issues uses should be well aware of going in.

Another major blind spot is the complete lack of any and all data backup and redundancy. A huge part of self hosting your own data is ensuring that it’s properly backed up and secured from things like a failing drive, someone accidentally deleting something, stuffing up a configuration change or even worse, a ransomware attack.

These sorts of critical files will normally be stored on a NAS which by default provides data redundancy through RAID. This allows for 1 or more disks to fail and still have your data be safe. With Umbrel, you only have 1 drive… so if it fails then poof. All your photos and files are gone. Not great and again, something users should consider seriously before they self host certain apps.