TBH, I don't think Software Engineering, especially just 2 years of experience, is going to really help you understand network architectures/distributed systems. You can probably build some small apps, but designing larger systems is a skill that requires intentional practice.
The best thing you can do is figure out how to containerize the stuff you want to run and store the configurations in source control. Figure out how to isolate your data and back it up, and then experiment with configuration changes to see how they change system behavior.
A few specific things to learn/practice.
- Learn how to break down a larger problem into distinct components with specific responsibilities.
- Learn about docker, what problem it solves.
- Learn how to experiment with the tools to find out what they can do, and how you can configure their behavior (docker is very helpful here, because you can spin up a temporary sandbox to figure things out without risk of breaking a "live" system).
I mean, snapshotting and piping it to an rclone mount is arguably simpler than trying to do your own ad hoc file syncronization, also does not require 2x the storage space.