I just set up everything via ansible and comment everything religiously, I’ve gotten to the point where I have playbooks for my laptop and desktop so if I have do do a clean install I just have to run the playbook and everything is set up and installed to my liking

It’s annoying to go to my playbook to make changes and rerun it every time I want to install or remove anything from my daily PCs, but it pays off when I migrate computers or for some reason have to do a clean install

And for high level stuff and things not in ansible I keep a tiddlywiki since no matter how catastrophic the failure of my systems I can always find a way to access an HTML file for my own reference

I recommend setting it up with a let’s encrypt cert via tailscale, that way not only you get a proper cert for free without opening your pihole to the internet, but also you get a way to use it when you are not at home, but if you are using a raspberry pi 1 or any other pi from the SD card I recommend using Log2ram in order to preserve the SD card

Edit: forgot to add that you should install zram-tools and run

sudo dphys-swapfile unistall

on a first gen pi since the low ram can increase the tendency to swap especially with unbound and that can also kill your SD card prematurely