You should consider reversing the roles. There's no reason your homelab cannot be the client, and have your vps be the server. Once the wireguard virtual network exists, network traffic doesn't really care which was the client and which was the server. Saves you from opening a port to attackers on your home network.

Tbh I sometimes sshfs mount a vps onto a home machine but doing it the other way around doesn't seem worthwhile. The idea of a vps is that it's in a data center, has tons of bandwidth, backup power, you can set up a failover scheme if you need high availability, etc. Stuff like media is on your home server so you can use it locally, and maybe it's backed up remotely just in case, but doesn't need to be live mounted. That said, I'm used to home internet being unreliable compared to VPS, so mounting it to a vps sounds flaky.

If you want more storage on your vps, just get a bigger one, I would say. Or if you want tons of remote storage, get something with better connectivity.

For the backup scenario in particular, it makes sense to pipe them through right to the destination. Like, tar -zcv somefiles | ssh $homeserver dd of=backup.tar.gz, or mysqldump | gzip -c | ssh $homeserver dd of=backup.sql.gz. Since it's basically a download from your home server's perspective it should be pretty fast, and you don't need temporary space at all on the VPS.

File caching might be a little tricky. You might be best self host some kind of object storage and put varnish/NGINX/dedicated caching proxy software in front of it on your VPS, so it can cache the responses but will ultimately forward to the home server over VPN if it doesn't have it cached.

If you use NextCloud for your photos and videos and stuff, it can use object storage instead of local filesystem, so it would work with that kind of setup.

I have a orangepi at home with a 2tb usb disk. I made it reachable via wireguard, and works very well as a samba server. No need to open any ports.

You could self-host a S3-compatible storage bucket with something like MinIO or Garage.

S3 backends are available in a lot of software and it's kinda made for a similar use-case. I don't know which projects have caching available in a way that aligns with your setup. But I found these two being easy to set up.

I haven't done it yet but I plan on doing it. But I never bothered with a VPN and just expose a ssh port. So I plan just to mount a directory with sshfs.

My solution is to use Rathole. I rent a wildly cheap (2 core, 4GB memory) VPS and basically just run Traefik there. Then I use Rathole to make some services hosted on my desktop available to Traefik.

I like this solution better than Wireguard for my application. It reduces attack surface to services you've explicitly set up, rather than a full data layer trunk between your machine and a potential malicious actor.

I've been wanting to do this exact thing. I already have wireguard setup. Please update us if you do this.

Also been thinking about doing something like this. Would love to hear about your experience deploying it.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 12 acronyms.

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I run everything local and have nginx proxy manager on the VPS