251–260 of 308 posts
What convenient solutions exist for graceful shutdown of a NAS, without data loss or other drama, in case of power outage? It seems a more pressing concern than flipped bits or network failures.
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Synology sure provides an expensive but complete package for home office and enthusiasts. Just buy it and be done with it. It's certainly more expensive than DIY it yourself using off the shelf components and things bought out of online classifieds. But for most people that have no interest in tinkering or don't know what to do, just paying the price of a complete solution might be worth it.
Totally. If you enjoy the config and have the time, by all means. If you just want it to work, by a Synology. Mine has been running strong for several years now and has docker images for my unify controller, pi hole and Plex. Took minimal time to setup and none since that day. Love it Edit: And my encrypted cloud backup in Backblaze B2 was equally as easy to setup and costs a whopping $2 a month for every family pic,…
got a rsync script that pushes backups to Dropbox, though just "can't lose" docs and other things I want in the cloud.
Everyone is an expert at storage as long as everything is working great. It's when stuff fails that you feel like an idiot and wished you had one extra hdd in your RAID array or a secondary NAS you were backing up to or one extra site you offloaded your data to. I don't do cheap any more. But I can see the appeal.
Kids today have no idea just how often drives failed back in the day.
"sure, grandpa, drives make noise [rolls eyes]"
OP has a perverse sense of humor :)
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But, not to waste space on this mindless joke, here's my (or, more precisely, my wife's) success story.
So, I've had it with a laptop and built myself a PC. Money wasn't really a problem, I just wanted to make sure I will have enough of everything, and spares, if necessary. So, I've got a be quiet case with eight caddies and a place for a SATA SSD. It's expensive... but it doubles as my main workstation, so I don't have any regrets about spending more on it! It has a ton of room for installing fans. It has like ten of them at this point, plus liquid cooling. The wifi modem that was built into the mobo that I bought doesn't have a good Linux driver... but the case has a ton of space, and so I could stick an external PCIe wifi modem. And I still have plenty of room left.
Anyways. My wife was given some space for her research in the institute she works for. And they get this space through some unknown company with vanishing IT support, where, in the end, all the company does is putting a fancy HTML front-end on Azure cloud services, sometimes mismanaging the underlying infrastructure. While the usage was uncomfortable but palatable, she continued using it. Then the bill came, and oh dear! And then she needed to use a piece of software that really, absolutely, unquestionably needs to be able to create symlinks. And the unknown company with vanishing IT has put together their research environment in such a way that NAS is connected via SMB, and... no symlinks.
So... I bought a bunch of 4T hard-drives, and now she has all the space she needs for her research. She doesn't even pay for electricity :(
Although not quite as cheap, I bought a mini pc (Intel N-95, 8GB, 256GB) for not a whole lot more. It has room for a 4TB SSD in a built-in enclosure, which I mirror to an external 4TB HDD nightly. Important stuff is cloud-synced and manually backed up monthly to a external HDD that lives at work. It also runs Jellyfin, minimserver, syncthing etc. One of the nice things is that it has a full sync of my cloud storage,…
My secret protip: old Fujitsu desktop/nuc PCs. At least in Germany (Europe?) they are cheap on ebay since a lot of businesses use them and upgrade on a regular schedule. If you care about power consumption like I do, you can Google "$model energy consumption white paper" which contains very accurate data about idle usage, for example https://sp.ts.fujitsu.com/dmsp/Publications/public/wp-energy... In one case I had a…
Don't share this information too far and wide, you might drive up the price for these in the second hand market, which will hurt us dirt-cheap-pc-gluts. I cannot say no to cheap compute for some reason.
I sympathise - for me I think it comes from growing up with early generation PCs that were expensive, hard to get, and not very performant; now you can buy something that's a supercomputer by comparison for almost nothing. Who can resist that?! I'll think of something to do with them all eventually...
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That's... Odd. I didn't click my own link yesterday after posting, but that was straight from Google and it did load just fine. Now I get the login too. But for completeness sake, another example: https://www.fujitsu.com/global/Images/wp_ESPRIMO_P758_E94.pd...
HN possibly sent too much traffic their way, and someone, somewhere decided to require credentials for access perhaps? :-)
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Seafile + Samba + OpenVPN is my stack. I use Seafile for a dropbox style file sync on my devices, and Samba for direct access. OpenVPN for remote access on all devices. Works quite well.
I’d replace OpenVPN with WireGuard at this point - WireGuard is a lot faster and the client software is pretty good. All of my Apple devices are set up to use VPN 100% of the time automatically if I’m not on home WiFi.
Thanks!
Although not quite as cheap, I bought a mini pc (Intel N-95, 8GB, 256GB) for not a whole lot more. It has room for a 4TB SSD in a built-in enclosure, which I mirror to an external 4TB HDD nightly. Important stuff is cloud-synced and manually backed up monthly to a external HDD that lives at work. It also runs Jellyfin, minimserver, syncthing etc. One of the nice things is that it has a full sync of my cloud storage,…
Cloud storage isn't a backup any more than RAID 1 is.
Not to be relied on by itself, but it absolutely qualifies as a backup.
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or even better - old laptop
Yep, optimised for power consumption, and comes with a built in UPS