I’d say you need storage. Once you get storage, use cases start popping up into view over time.

If you want to stay fully self-hosted, look into Headscale. You could run it locally with a port open, or you could throw it on the tiniest cloud VM somewhere and have zero ports open at home.

I’m doing the same with Apache in a container. Using Let’s Encrypt with DNS challenge for SSL certificate. The DNS records point to the reverse proxy IP which is only accessible via VPN (Tailscale). 😂

I second the smart switch strategy, especially when using a fixture with several bulbs.

As for ZigBee however, I’ve been using Home Assistant Yellow with its built-in ZigBee radio and ZHA, and it’s been flawless. Any issues I’ve have been a matter of reinforcing the network by adding a few smart plugs. I got over 60 devices hooked to it at the moment. Z-Wave has been just as problem-free. The really nice thing about having a Z-something network is the ability to use low power devices like battery powered sensors and switches/controls. Want a smart doorbell that plays a chime on all speakers and sends you a phone notification? Stick any ZigBee button to the outside of your door and program the automation. Its battery lasts two years.

The high CRI Philips Ultra Definition bulbs with a smart dimmer. I use them with a Z-Wave Leviton but there’s ZigBee options too if you don’t have a Z-Wave radio. Those bulbs make the most beautiful light… I use the warm ones 2700K or so because they’re the best for the eyes. It seems Cree and Feit also have high CRI bulbs but I haven’t tried them.

I was wondering when piracy is going to join the game. Awkwardly absent so far.

I think the really useful idea here is solving the scaling issue by limiting the source sites to a known good set. 95% of the time I am not looking for results from unknown sites. In fact I actively work to get information from the sites I trust.

Sir, every professional developer knows there’s never time and people to maintain the testing environment so testing is done in production! That testing environment you’re dreaming of is missed shareholder value.

USB 3 should be plenty fast. Even 4-disks per port do 600MB/s. Get some USB-SATA adapters, or a multibay box, or some enclosures, and a USB hub. I was running 2 4-bay boxes on 2 USB 3 5Gb ports with 8-disk RAIDz2. Peaks at 1.3GB/s.

Wait, I thought you’re French, dad sniffing the Fox from France?

Right so I guess the question of 3 is whether it means 3 backups or 3 copies. If we take it literally - 3 copies, then it does protect from user error only. If 3 backups, it protects against hardware failure too.

E: Seagate calls them copies and explicitly says the implementer can choose how the copies are distributed across the 2 media. The woodchipper scenario would be handled by the 2 media requirement.

Hm I wonder why snapshots wouldn’t satisfy 3. Copies on the same disk like /file, /backup1/file, /backup2/file should satisfy 3. Why wouldn’t snapshots be equivalent if 3 doesn’t guard against filesystem or hardware failure? Just thinking and curious to see opinion.

• Primary ZFS pool with automatic snapshots
  • Provides 3+ copies of the files via snapshots (3)
• Secondary ZFS pool at a different location replicates the primary
  • Provides more copies of the files (3)
  • Provides second media (2)
  • Is off-site (1)

Does this make sense?

The answer for doing this on your PC is Docker with one of the open source containers built for this. For example this.

If you want a dedicated machine, your Pi would do just fine but you’ll have to connect your storage where the downloads are to it. You should still use Docker for that since it’s the easiest setup and it would take care of important corner cases such as blocking seed when the VPN is down.

If Raid is backup, then Unraid is?

Try ZFS send if you have ZFS on the other side. It’s insane. No file IO, just snap and time for the network transfer of the delta.

Every hour. Could do it more frequently if needed.

It depends on how resource intensive the backup process is.

Consider an 800GB Immich instance.

Using Duplicity or rsync takes 1 hour per backup. 99% of the time is spent in traversing the directory structure and checking which files have changed. 1% is spent into transferring the difference to the backup. Any backup system that operates on top of the file system would take this much. In addition, unless you’re using something that can take snapshots of the filesystem, you have to stop Immich during the backup process in order to prevent backing up an invalid app state.

Using ZFS send on the other hand (with syncoid) takes less than 5 seconds to discover the differences and the rest of the time is spent on the data transfer, at 100MB/s in my case. Since ZFS send is based on snapshots, I don’t have to stop the service either.

When I used Duplicity to backup, I would backup once week because the backup process was long and heavy on the disk array. Since I switched to ZFS send, I do it once an hour because there’s almost no visible impact.

I’m now in the process of migrating my laptop to ZFS on root in order to be able to utilize ZFS send for regular full system backups. If successful, eventually I’ll move all my machines to ZFS on root.

What’s the second B stand for?

WTF, I always thought Dr. Oetker was just another brand of some American multinational. It’s apparently German.

Why did you do that to yourself… 🥹