So I want to setup a remote backup location at my parents house although they are very mindful about there electricity usage and environmental impact (and so am I) so I don’t want to have to have a pc always on when it doesn’t need to be.
Is it possible to setup remote Wake-on-lan so I can schedule my homelab at my place to wake up the server at my parents house and start a backup like once a week, I want to do this in a secure fashion as well so ideally no port forwarding, I currently use cloudflare tunnels for my home network.
Are there any other options or do you have a similar setup at your place?


You can even use an ESP32 or similar since it just has to perform 1 tiny function.
Getting an WT32-ETH01 knockoff dev board for 15€ or PoE for 25€ and uses <300mW with the wireless modem off. You could even just use a WiFi module for 8€ if you don’t want something wired.
https://registry.platformio.org/libraries/a7md0/WakeOnLan
There is already an wakeonlan library to generate a packet very easily.
You can even do it in pseudocode with ESPHome if you have HomeAssistant
https://community.home-assistant.io/t/solved-wake-on-lan-packet-from-esp32-to-ha-server-how-to-automate/617595
Then VPN in, send a signal to the esp using one of various methods to tell it to send the packet.
this sounds like it requires another computer already turned on