Good for them.

Go where you think is best for your business.

As others have said, use tools like borg and restic.

Shop around for cloud storage with good pricing for your use-case. Many charge for different usage patterns, like restoring data or uploading.

Check out storj.io, I like their pricing - they charge for downloading/restore (IIRC), and I figure that’s a cost I can live with if I need to restore.

Otherwise I keep 3 local copies of data:

1 is live, and backed up to storj.io

2 is mirrored from 1 every other week

3 is mirrored from 1 every other week, opposite 2

This works for my use-case, where I’m concerned about local failures and mistakes (and don’t trust my local stores enough to use a backup tool), but my data doesn’t change a lot in a week. If I were to lose 1 week of changes, it would be a minor issue. And I’m trusting my cloud backup to be good (I do test it quarterly, and do a single file restore test monthly).

This isn’t an ideal (or even recommended approach), just works with the storages I currently have, and my level of trust of them.

I have no explanation. Really shocked me that idle was that low, and I ran the meter on it for a week with it mostly just sitting there, and some file copy action. I could see in the power chart when I copied files, then it would fall back to 12w. Nuts.

I have to make a config change soon (add a drive and a fan), I’ll put the meter back on for a week.

Because no one wanted to?

You haven’t, right? Why? As you said, you don’t have the programming skills (neither do I).

It’s always just that simple - someone with the expertise doesn’t feel like doing it. Nothing more, nothing less.

Sometimes, people like you and me get motivated enough to go learn how to do these things, or find people with the skills.

Hell, using consumer grade, free tools (handbrake) I can convert a DVD to mkv and reduce the file size upwards of 75%, and still be perfectly viewable on a current 65" TV.

I can only imagine the capabilities of Google/YouTube. It would be fascinating to see a high level diagram of how they handle a video.

Shove your politics where the sun don’t shine.

Device Manager shows i7-7700, 3.6ghz, 8 cores

Maxes at 3gb 32gb of ram, unfortunately, since I run some vm’s on it.

Good to know! Wow, I’m impressed by the low power draw.

Thanks, I wanted to add a video card for conversion jobs, but didn’t think it had enough power.

Sounds like she virtualized and got her brother to host.😋

I have an older (2017) Dell SFF OptiPlex 7050 that idles about 12w, with 3 drives (each 1 TB, spinning disk).

It peaks about 80w when I’m doing conversions, but I can keep that down by limiting cpu usage for handbrake (it doesn’t convert faster above 4 cores anyway, just uses more power).

I was surprised by the low idle power, I would’ve been happy with upwards of 40w since my previous machine idled at 100w.

So I think very low idle is possible, I’m just not sure why this box idles so low.

Disks add wattage when running, but when idle use very little power, less than SSD.

Suprisingly hard drives often use less power than SSD because they can spin down, and because they use less power during writes than SSD.

https://www.windowscentral.com/hardware/ssd-vs-hdd-we-know-about-speed-but-what-about-power-consumption

Meh, end of support from MS. If you think an OS dies or becomes “unsafe” just because support has ended, you’re probably not doing security layering.

I have never unintentionally gotten a virus or malware (and my experience predates any version of Windows). (I say unintentionally because I’ve unzipped untrustworthy shareware on test machines in the days before virtualizatiom).

I just shut down a Win7 box in 2024. There are still DOS-based Windows boxes out there running things like CNC machines.

They aren’t “unsafe”, because they’re properly isolated, properly managed.

The problem with user machines is the user themselves. Don’t run as admin, don’t click on shit you don’t know what it does. End users see a dialog box as a barrier, not information - they just click it away. No amount of OS upgrades are going to protect them from their own laziness. And frankly, I have no sympathy for them.

Simply not running as Admin prevents 90%+ of consumer security concerns.

As support for family and friends, I’m not sending them to Linux (though I use 3 distros every day). I don’t have time to handhold them when problems arise - things like “my mouse doesn’t work”. Oh, you’re running a distro that doesn’t support the most common mouse in the world, but I only found that out by doing a web search. Yet other distros have no problem. But those other distros have their differences that will eventually show up. Laptop power management in Linux is practically non-existent.

I copied this from a post a while back. Want to know why “just switch to Linux” is a poor response? These 2 people laid it out far better than I can:

My standard response to “just go Linux” :

I keep having to say this, as much as I like Linux for certain things, as a desktop it’s still no competition to Windows, even with this awful shit going on.

As some background - I had my first UNIX class in about 1990.

I run a Mint laptop (for the hell of it, and I do mean hell) . Power management is a joke. Configured as best as possible, walked in the other day and it was dead - as in battery at zero, won’t even boot.

Windows would never do this, no, Windows could never do this. It is incapable of running a battery to zero, it’ll shutoff before then to protect the battery. To really kill it you have to boot to BIOS and let it sit, Windows will not let a battery get to zero.

There’s no way even possible via the Mint GUI to config power management for things like low/critical battery conditions /actions. None, nada, zip, not at all. Command line only, in the twenty-first century, something Windows has had since I don’t recall, 95 I think (I was carrying a laptop then, and I believe it had hibernate, sorry, it’s been what, almost thirty years now).

There are many reasons why Linux doesn’t compete with Windows on the desktop - this is just one glaring one.

Now let’s look at Office. Open an Excel spreadsheet with tables in any app other than excel. Tables are something that’s just a given in excel, takes 10 seconds to setup, and you get automatic sorting and filtering, with near-zero effort. The devs of open office refuse to support tables, saying “you should manage data in a proper database app”. While I don’t disagree with the sentiment, no, I’m not setting up a DB in an open-source competitor to Access. That’s just too much effort for simple sorting and filtering tasks, and isn’t realistically shareable with other people. I do this several times a day in excel.

Now there’s that print monitor that’s on by default, and can only be shut up by using a command line. Wtf? Again, in the 21st century?

Networking… Yea, samba works, but how do you clear creds you used one time to connect to a share, even though you didn’t check the box for “save creds”? (Wait, so what does that checkbox do then?) Oh, yea, command line again or go download an app to clear them for for you. In the 21st century?

Oh, you have a wireless Logitech mouse? Linux won’t even recognize it. You have to search for a solution and go find a third-party download that makes it work. My brand new wireless mouse works on any version of Windows since Win2k (at the least) and would probably work on Win95. Linux didn’t even recognize my ten year old Logitech mouse. And you folks keep saying Linux supports more stuff than Windows? Right.

Someone else said it better than me:

Every time I’ve installed Linux as my main OS (many, many times since I was younger), it gets to an eventual point where every single thing I want to do requires googling around to figure out problems. While it’s gotten much better, I always ended up reinstalling Windows or using my work Mac. Like one day I turn it on and the monitor doesn’t look right. So I installed twenty things, run some arbitrary collection of commands, and it works… only it doesn’t save my preferences.

So then I need to dig into .bashrc or .bash_profile (is bashrc even running? Hey let me investigate that first for 45 minutes) and get the command to run automatically… but that doesn’t work, so now I can’t boot… so I have to research (on my phone now, since the machine deathscreens me once the OS tries to load) how to fix that… then I am writing config lines for my specific monitor so it can access the native resolution… wait, does the config delimit by spaces, or by tabs?? anyway, it’s been four hours, it’s 3:00am and I’m like Bryan Cranston in that clip from Malcolm in the Middle where he has a car engine up in the air all because he tried to change a lightbulb.

And then I get a new monitor, and it happens all damn over again. Oh shit, I got a new mouse too, and the drivers aren’t supported - great! I finally made it to Friday night and now that I have 12 minutes away from my insane 16 month old, I can’t wait to search for some drivers so I can get the cursor acceleration disabled. Or enabled. Or configured? What was I even trying to do again? What led me to this?

I just can’t do it anymore. People who understand it more than I will downvote and call me an idiot, but you can all kiss my ass because I refuse to do the computing equivalent of building a radio out of coconuts on a deserted island of ancient Linux forum posts because I want to have Spotify open on startup EVERY time and not just one time. I have tried to get into Linux as a main dev environment since 1997 and I’ve loved/liked/loathed it, in that order, every single time.

I respect the shit out of the many people who are far, far smarter than me who a) built this stuff, and 2) spend their free time making Windows/Mac stuff work on a Linux environment, but the part of me who liked to experiment with Linux has been shot and killed and left to rot in a ditch along the interstate.

Now I love Linux for my services: Proxmox, UnRAID, TrueNAS, containers for Syncthing, PiHole, Owncloud/NextCloud, CasaOS/Yuno, etc, etc. I even run a few Windows VM’s on Linux (Proxmox) because that’s better than running Linux VM’s on a Windows server.

Linux is brilliant for this stuff. Just not brilliant for a desktop, let alone in a business environment.

Linux doesn’t even use a common shell (which is a good thing in it’s own way), and that’s a massive barrier for users.

If it were 40 years ago, maybe Linux would’ve had a chance to beat MS, even then it would’ve required settling on a single GUI (which is arguably half of why Windows became a standard, the other half being a common API), a common build (so the same tools/utilities are always available), and a commitment to put usability for the inexperienced user first.

These are what MS did in the 1980’s to make Windows attractive to the 3 groups who contend with desktops: developers, business management, end users.

All this without considering the systems management requirements of even an SMB with perhaps a dozen users (let alone an enterprise with tens of thousands).

Also Wireguard, which is what Tailscale uses.

Resilio Sync or Syncthing

Ah, just saw the browser requirement.

In nextcloud discussions I’ve heard of Seafile. I’ve never used it, so not sure what it’s capable of.

Meh, DRM has been repeatedly circumvented. It’s a cat-and-mouse game, with very few cats (DRM developers/vendors) and many mice (DRM circumventors) who are very motivated.

DRM is to prevent the average consumer from sharing stuff.

Using a mesh network like Wireguard/Tailscale enables you to have a public interface that’s not on your home router, but the VPS instead.

I dunno, I’ve listened to some Middle English on a History of English podcast, and could follow along only slightly. I’m sure I could come up to speed quickly, since it at least has the French influence already (if I remember right).

I’m not familiar with the great vowel shift, is that a result of the Norman invasion in 1066, adding French into Old English? (That’s the sequence, right? It’s been a while since I read about it).

Because I don’t need a reverse proxy?

Also, as for ease of setup, with Tailscale I install an app and login. Done.

It’s pretty simple, the candidate didn’t meet the requirements.

Not sure why you’re involved, this is an HR and legal issue. If HR said they don’t have docs showing eligibility, then that needs to be reported to the recruiter, otherwise they’re going to recommend this person to somewhere else, and run into the same issue. How would you feel if you were in their shoes?

Whether someone can legally work somewhere is not your problem to solve, unless you can actually do something, like help them submit appropriate paperwork (I’ve done this for employees who were temps, to help them get more permanent status).

This is all HR’s problem, not anyone else’s. It’s what HR is for.

Not sure why they’re punting it back to you.