But then we’d miss the fun of domain specific units, like A barn

I don’t know why I didn’t think of that! I have a number of pis and a few outdated mini-pcs. I didn’t connect that fact they can be miserable to use so long as it validates it works. Thank you so much!

So I had questions on practicing restore! I wanted to start by just making sure I had something, but how does one validate, short of having a duplicate hardware setup to restore to?

Some of this is a bit extreme but a lot of it is capabilities I’ll be slowly building up. Read only backups is a fantastic point. I am indeed working at offsite backups. I have a separate drive for all the “untimely exit” stuff, and, most importantly, a physical printed folder in a fireproof safe. I have had/have some health issues that make it relevant. I strongly encourage practicality of air-tight security there. A plain text with accounts and passwords is a bad idea, but plain text naming where accounts are is reasonable. Yes, there’s always social engineering, but the people at those firms should be looking for proper legal documentation from the executor of the estate, and 98% of people are more likely to have a loved one who is cleaning things up than have someone stealing their identity. There is so much to handle when someone passes, any impediment makes it more likely someone just brute forces things.

Re: Scrubbing “impolite” data. I lost someone last fall who was a data nut (tons of personal and professional videos and photos). We joked about finding their porn stash, but mostly we got drunk clicked around, and laughed at them flubbing a take at a work video, I cried a bit at a motorcycle maintenance list they never got to, that kind of thing. End of life is messy and gross. If it doesn’t carry jail time I can promise you no one will care whats on the computer after cleaning the endless bodily fluids out of the bed and carpet.

I may pattern the backups of some drives, but there’s no way I’m going to have enough space to do that for 20+ TB of media. I like my media archive, I’ve spent a long time building it, but having the main drive, the local backup in a RAID, and an offsite is probably where that will end. The offsite will probably be a monthly one so that should help.

On the other hand, I am working on cool genealogy project through gramps, which is intended to be a “forever archive” kind of thing. That I may pattern as the data would be incredibly difficult to replace and there’s an increased chance of non-malicious issues given I’ll be opening it up to extended family of varying technical expertise. THAT I may pattern more extensively the way you suggest.

This is really helpful thank you! I think it’s samba share? Whatever Unraid has just baked in and calls “shares”.

Googling rsync that looks like it’ll work, and faster is better!

While I do want true backups of a few drives (as in: if a drive fails, restore the backup to a new drive, physically swap it out, and you’re good to go), the majority of the data I’m just looking to have it “backed up” (as in: all of the files are present in more than one location). The majority of the data is ~18TB of media for my plex server. My unraid is: 1x 2TB, 1x 10TB, 1x20TB and 1x20TB(parity). It sounds like Rsync-ing the 20TB drive with my plex media and the 20TB unraid disk would get me what I need?

Thanks for the pointers, getting a few things to google is incredibly helpful.

Similar. I got a vehicle that had android auto, but not wireless. Plugging and unplugging all the time I’d go through a cable every few months. Power would work, but the shielding would break and it would screw with cell/GPS until I replaced the cable.

Got a wireless android auto adapter to stop buying cables. That’s great but I knew I wouldn’t plug in my phone every time like normal, so I use the wireless charging.

Exactly. Whats funny is facebook could have done this in like… 2010. Like I’m fairly certain I had “group pages” back then that were a very small number of people. But you’re right, the channel thing is crazy useful. Like my one group has 3 people, but we’ve got like 50 topics. It’s gotten to the point there are archives, ie: the “thanksgiving” channel moves from the “archive” group to “general” group around mid sept.

I’ve also been lucky enough to avoid having it be work related. Like I have slack for work, that notification noise is the devil, where as the discord notification noise means my buddy is posting pictures of his kid.

1000% agree. Like I use it for some spread out family (one server) and college friends. There’s <5 people in each. I think eventually forums will adopt the fediverse infrastructure. I’m on an old school forum for my vehicle, and it’s great. It’s direct out of 2010, it wouldn’t suprise me if those kind of sites brought in all the code that the fediverse runs off of. As a casual observer, that’s really what lemmy seems like to me: “what if 2005 internet, where people managed their own webpages, but it ran on a common architecture that made it easier to cross-link with other sites if you wanted?”

They do still exist, I have a specific but popular vehicle, and there’s a dedicated forum style site directly from 2011.

In a perfect world, that would be folded into the “fediverse” protocols, but like they’re already paying their own hosting etc. In the end that’s all reddit did: absorb some nominal hosting and IT for exposure. It made sense for hype niche communities, which is how reddit grew, but now that they’re killing control of the communities… Well… It turns out people were willing to pay for those servers back when they were expensive…

Discord is amazing for a step beyond group messages. I have no idea how it got into a roll as a “community tool”.

you are correct. On holiday with a few beers I’m surprised I got that close lol

For anyone in that spot of being savvy-ish but having fellow users that finally got used to plex:

A work around is Xteve and owncast. I was successfully able to make an owncast broadcast into a “DVR channel”.

Its cluegy but it does work. My tech level in this stuff is spotty. I’m used to stacks of tech but more for physical control systems (NOT consumer facing). But I was able to get that to work.

Edit: little bit of clarification: Xteve will let you add DVR to your plex server. It’s possible to tie owncast into Xteve. That allows users to cue into a “DVR” channel which is kind of “simulcasting” whatever you’re pointing owncast to. In my case it was a screen share of sportsball, but it could be whatever.

oh this seems like the worst thing ever. I used to have a lot spaghetti stuff reporting. I did not need to be spending this kind of money on ESPs…

thanks, the fact that there’s this level of insight in the community makes me comfortable of going down this road. I’ll keep an eye on integrations.

And it’s explicitly “not all data”? I’m really impressed by the community, I’d assume if a Philips lightbulb was getting access to geolocation data via HA someone would have noticed.

Clear answer, thank you so much. Glad to hear there’s a community. Worst case scenario I can always make it so a self-hosted voice to text triggers a script on a local device through a spotify API.

Glad to hear it, it’s not so much suspicious as the principle. It’s weird, I just hate the notion that if I bump up my thermostat a degree or two someone who I pay to give me music is keeping track.

this is fantastic, I’m really excited. I do have a follow up on non-hardware integrations though. I know when I download anything on my phone, it’s sharing all sorts of crap. Does HA allow integrations to do that? Going back to spotify example, I understand spotify can obviously track things on their end (what song they’re giving me etc), but integrations don’t let them see humidity in my basement right?

ESPhome is exactly the kind of platform I was looking to use. My hope was to standardize a design or two so I could have some I deployed where needed (garage, basement, etc). That’s fantastic, thank you!

This is PERFECT. Thank you. I need figure out Tailscale, I’m much better at the device level than networking, but your answers gave me what I’m looking for: Keep an eye on the device and how it’s used and it’s workable. Thank you!

I love this. I have a box I’ve been wanting to move to a family members place because they have fiber and I don’t. They’re heavy users of the plex server I have on there, so they’re happy to host it, but if I ever had issues around anything boot related I’d be down until I could physically get there.

This would also be awesome for troubleshooting some RasPi stuff where I kind of want the DE every now and then but mostly let it run headless.