It’s been a few years since I posted about my NAS upgrade ideas and one of my major points was how to do regular off-site backups.
TL;DR: I use Rclone with AWS S3 as a backend. Versioning enabled and cron setup in TrueNAS to run a sync with bandwidth limiting, performance+cost tuning, file filtering and logging of the output.
A long time ago I would just manually do an off-site back up of my data to Google Drive, a laborious and time intensive process thanks to ADSL internet and the finicky nature of the Google Drive web interface.
I’ve posted a bunch about LBS (my NAS) before because it’s such a core part of the way I backup and maintain data1; from important documents and photos to old work and hobbies. But space is always a cost, especially with regular offsite backups. As an example of my data hoarding I’ve got about 78GB of photos, some of which date back to 2001. Thankfully the photos from that far back were taken on a digital camera that saved them to floppy disk but the proliferation of amazingly powerful smartphone cameras makes it so easy to take heaps of incredibly high resolution snaps with no remorse or regret.
I discovered Funkwhale a while back, but didn’t go further than understanding where it fit as a cool “Fediverse” project.
But ever since my 2021 ICT Goals post, I’ve been wanting a media player that lets me play my own music. Stuff that I’ve purchased from Bandcamp/BeatPort/iTunes or from CDs that I’ve purchased and ripped onto my computer. Unfortunately I have three regularly used machines (1 desktop, 2 laptops), plus my phone, meaning a standard music player application isn’t appropriate for managing my library.
I recently discussed my network attached storage server yet again, and it made me think about what the future holds for this device. I did some brainstorming and settled on the following areas of potential changes and upgrades.
Permissions Currently the NAS is open, a trust model that has been fine in all the living situations I’ve used it. Everyone on the network has read/write guest access to the network file share componenets and although the FreeNAS web interface does have a username and password it is still shared with a limited group.
The Ship Of Theseus is a thought experiment proposing “if every part of an object is replaced over some period of time, does it still remain the same object”? The version of the thought puzzle concerning Theseus was discussed by Plutarch and talks about the Athenians preserving the ship upon which Theseus returned from Crete. Stored in the harbour, it rotted and decayed over time and so each part was slowly replaced so that it would not fall apart.
Herein you shalt find the hardware that currently (+/- time) acts as the base for the various parts of my life that require servers not provided by places of work and/or education.