Hello from a new user — first impressions on OPNsense

[isaacward]

Hi everyone,

I recently installed OPNsense on a small home-lab box (an older Intel mini-PC I had sitting around) and wanted to say hello. The setup went surprisingly smoothly — the installer is a lot friendlier than I expected, and the web UI feels very polished.

A few things I'm enjoying so far:
- Clear dashboard with real-time traffic graphs right after install
- Very readable firewall rule editor (the aliases system is great for grouping IPs/ports)
- Plugins from the web UI — I'm experimenting with the Zenarmor plugin for category-based filtering

Couple of small questions for more experienced users:
1. Is there a recommended backup strategy besides the built-in "Config > Backups" page? I'd like to push configs off-box periodically.
2. For a home network with ~25 devices, does it make sense to run Suricata in IDS mode right away, or is it better to wait until I have baseline traffic stats?

Thanks in advance, and looking forward to learning from the community!