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
Depends on your hardware. My routers can serve as a Wireguard serveur, so no need for a computer for that part