This is all super helpful, appreciate it. Just for clarity, the mini PC right now is one of those tiny HP EliteDesks. Definitely no room to fit any extra drives, but I already pulled the trigger on a second machine after doing some more research, and that should be plenty for something that’s basically just going to be a storage box.

Good catch on the redundancy, at the time posting this I didn’t realize I needed the physical space/drives to set up that safety net. 8 should be plenty for the time being. Say if I wanted to add another drive or two down the road, what sort of complications would that introduce here?

I do have a backup plan but the mirror safety net is definitely a good call, since it’s not an ideal solution. Right now I’m storing most backups internally, on a small USB drive, and uploaded to a b2 bucket, while I’m manually backing up all of that plus my media/emulation library to a 20TB external drive once a month and shoving it in my storage unit in between.

Good to know network latency shouldn’t be too noticeable, guess that does make sense. I don’t expose anything publicly, LAN/VPN only and it’s just my wife and I here, so I’m not too concerned with locking down access any more than it needs to be.

I completely forgot about this thing

This is actually really helpful and reassuring, even if I’m not planning on going that far with it just yet. tbh it feels like I’m overcomplicating the entire concept in my head, but that’s par for the course

This is what I’m currently doing, I use backblaze b2 for basically everything that’s not movies/shows/music/roms, along with backing up my docker stacks etc to the same external drive my media’s currently on.

I’m looking at a few good steps to upgrade this but nothing excessive:

• NAS for media and storing local backups
• Regular backups of everything but media to a small USB drive
• Get a big ass external HDD that I’ll update once a month with everything and keep in my storage unit and ditch backblaze

Not the cleanest setup but it’ll do the job. The media backup is definitely gonna be more of a 2-1-Pray system LMAO but at least the important things will be regularly taken care of

I’ve got a shitty little android one I impulse bought a while back, I should play around with it

This is exactly it. A lot of my good friends are from my old smash melee days, and my current circle is mostly from destiny 2. I don’t play either game these days or keep in the loop with the games’ overall communities, but that doesn’t change much with this crew. Hell, someone I met through destiny LFG years ago flew out to my wedding last year.

This is a bit of a tangent but this is a big part of why I didn’t get back into software dev after my team was let go. My old company is basically just a genAI shitshow these days and the entire culture in that industry is fucked.

I’m still in a role adjacent to what I used to do, but I’m much happier here even if it pays substantially less.

These services aren’t super expensive and they tend to do a pretty efficient job. I had a weirdo trying to doxx me for a year and was just pulling outdated info off broker sites, it’s a pain in the ass and clearing out that into all at once helps ease the mind.

That’s what I’ve been using and it works great, though I’d prefer to use something FOSS. But everyone just always seems to vouch for Magic Earth and I guess vetted their privacy policy pretty well.

I just set it up this week, I was just settling with nextcloud memories before. Night and day difference.

A few pain points in the process but overall was pretty easy to set up and even add 2FA (though I can’t say authelia was easy to set up to do so), and once it’s off the ground it’s super smooth

The trump admins have both been a shitshow but realistically they’re just taking the problems this country has always had and is blasting them on full display, and now people are finally starting to realize this country has ALWAYS been a capitalist shithole.