Heh, CLOAD…“PRESS PLAY ON TAPE”
My first machine was a COCO model 1, then a 2, then a TRS80 Model 4. I only ever saw Hunt The Wumpus on my buddy’s TI-99.
I still.have a TI99
My sister got my TI-89 stolen out of her truck when she was borrowing it for college. She had left it on the seat in the cab 
Fail to ban didn’t exist, this was almost 20 years ago. I was using ssh keys anyway, there’s no way they could brute it.
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I’m stepping in a little late, it’s been busy here lately. I’m running two Dell rack mount servers, one on Server Essentials and the other just running Windows 10. The Server Essentials machine has eight 2TB drives in RAID6 to give me 12TB of storage, gives me an external interface I can use to RDP into any of my machines at home, monitors my weather system and cameras and provides DHCP and DNS for the local machines. The W10 system has essentially the same storage setup and does nothing except backup the server. I built this using used machines in 2016 and have had one drive failure so far. Both machines have the Dell RAID cards in them (H700?) and I think I was into them for about a grand when I built them, most of the cost was the drives…
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Guess i’ll chime in as being new to replying here. I have a huge rackmount setup in basement and gig fiber probably a little more advanced than what you want to do:/
I run openmediavault over 64 bit debian linux
I use union filesystem to combine my drives into nice groups - Main pool of 120TB and the scratch pool of 12 TB (working and downloads area). Union fs (used to be called mergerfs) allows me to mix and match sizes of drives as needed so i add drives only when i need more space
I use snapraid and three dedicated 8tb drives as backups to allow for up to three drives to fail so i can recover them
$12 a month to google storage to keep a copy backed up there
My storage build
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Man, that sounds SERIOUS. I guess as an update, I’ve been messing with my router’s network share function. Seems ok for a little while, then just disappears. Not good enough.
I’ve put this on the back burner for now. Gonna let it percolate since I won’t really be able to get anything together until after the house build anyway.
Besides, I’ve gotten back to my car project. I meant to make a post today in off topic like I promised a while ago, but took some pto for a 4 day weekend and today was my first day back, so you KNOW I was exhausted, lol!
My strategy regarding backup is to duplicate all the important data on all my computers.
So basically, pictures, important documents, etc.
I have 4 or 5 computers at home, some old ones and some more recent as well as a server.
So I’m using freefilesync to synchronize important folders between all the machines. That way if one machine is down, then I still have the data available on the other ones.
Freefilesync symchonizes everytime any machine is connected to the home network so I don’t have to do anything.
So basically, unless my house explodes and destroys every single computer inside, I’m pretty safe.
Movies, softwares and other stuff can always be downloaded again, so I don’t bother duplicating these, they stay on a hard drive on my server and I just have a backup on an external HDD that I do maybe once a year.
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man it is worth it to have an offsite backup just in case. House fires and whatnot happen
I know, but I’m not a big fan of the cloud stuff so I try to stay out of it as much as I can, it poses other concerns even though I have nothing very sensitive nor much to hide anyways. Giving all your important stuff to these companies is always a big risk you should think about.
Our houses here in China are made entirely of concrete, they are less likely to burn entirely so that kind of scenario has a very low probability of occurrence.
Also, lots of very important documents are saved on my phone, which is very likely to be with me in case of such event.
Makes sense but i heavily encrypt everything using rclone so im not too worried
Most of the online backup tools allow you to encrypt on the client side before pushing the files up to their servers.
I use one for my main system. Everything else in the house pushes to the server in the shop.
Well, you all forced me into it… I’m replacing one of my older servers (Dell R410, 16GB, 12TB) with a slightly newer one (Dell R420, 48GB, 18TB). I looked at the Windows Server Essentials 2019 version and discovered everything I use often is no longer included, but found here that I could do a 2019 Standard install, then add the Essentials role back in from a 2016 SE image. So I’m hard at work with that this weekend… Now, if I could only figure out why the 10Ge card isn’t working. 
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I was pretty happy with my recent install of a second router. What do you do with that kind of a monster machine?
Since it’s running Essentials it sets me up for remote access to any of the computers in the house from anywhere. That also includes remote access to any of my files as well. That uses a dynamic DNS service that MS provides for free and I use it for other things, like my cameras. It also takes each of the client machines in the house and backs them up each night. I’ve only had to use the restore function once and it went smoothly. It’s also a media share server, so videos, music, recorded TV, etc. are accessible to each of the clients as if they had the data locally. I’ve got a second machine that is only used to backup the server, giving me two baskets for my eggs. I’ll be retiring the third machine after this new one is up and working, that will be three servers I have in my ‘gotta find a use for them someday’ pile. Including the switch with 10Ge support I’ll be into the new setup about $500. Don’t you love the secondary market…
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I run esxi on mine and fill it up with test VMs.
It also runs plex and two pihole instances. There’s an nfsserver in there and some other dev VMs.
100% overkill. It sits idle most of the time as pihole can run on a raspberry pi
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I have a different machine that’s running VMs, but it’s not in the house. IIRC it’s got 92GB of memory, dual processors with 6 cores each, and is running a half dozen servers. There’s a domain controller, a database server, a web server and two mail servers, all on Windows. Oh, and a management machine and there’s one more VM running a Linux flavor as a game server, but that’s pretty low impact since there aren’t more than a half dozen of us in the world on it. (Though most of us have been with it for twenty years or more).
I wonder how it works:
-What happens if you lose the encription key?
-How do you store this key?
-What happens if the company who makes this encription software bankrupts/gets out of business/makes a new version of the decription software that makes yours obsolete or incompatble/whatever and the encription software doesn’t work anymore?
Maybe my questions are stupid or irrelevant, in which case sorry, I never used such things so I’m just assuming they work in a certain way.
Depends on the encryption scheme. I have mine printed out, and stored on a separate usb drive. They’re luks encrypted, so unless linux as a whole goes away, I think I’m alright.
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Those are valid questions and I had the same ones. The answer is different depending on the company you go with, but I can tell you the answers for the software I use.
You lose your ability to access your backup. Period. End of story. Delete it and start over… don’t lose your key
I have mine stored in a few different ways. I use lastpass and have it in there. I also have it stored a few other locations in case lastpass ever fails, goes bankrupt, etc
This is the biggie… When you buy into a backup company, you buy into their ability to not do these things without a chance for you to do something about it. The company I chose dropped their ‘home use’ license a few years ago and went ‘business license only’… which cost a bit more. The provided multiple emails leading up to the cutover date and gave me ample time to pull down my data if I wanted to and back it up somewhere else. I chose to stay with them at the slightly increased rate. If the company made newer software that was incompatible with the older backups, they’d lose all those customers and probably be open to litigation from major companies that use them. You’re paying them to NOT do stupid stuff like this.
Realize that I’m speaking about a paid for service here. Not some open-source/free software going to who knows where on the internet. Major backup companies are going to take your backups very seriously.
For those that are curious, I use crashplan. I’ve been using them since we lost all our data (mostly pictures of our 1 year old daughter) when a laptop was stolen 9 years ago. I’ve even migrated the single license that I have to two different computers in that time with 0 issues. I used the restore function to pull files down to the new computer when the hard drive in the older laptop stopped working. (yes I could have just replaced the hard drive, but the laptop was older and I wanted a new one 
)
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