Your perspective aligns with a lot of self-hoisters who run things on rpi’s and such, but not the “home labbers”. Also, see the pubnix, tildeverse, smol web, indie web, and to some extent the retro computing communities. You are definitely not alone!
Restic is great, and the de-duplication between snapshots is amazingly good. Same content in different files (e.g. tar files of linux systems) take very little space like magic). Backrest is a nice web frontend for it.
Note that you should use some retention features of your provider to manage the risk of ransomware deleting your backups.
This comment prompted me to look for a picture of it. Nothing I can find, except in the background behind a baby picture of my now-in-university baby when I was apparently debugging the network connection:
There was a time when I had an old desktop packed full of spinning hard drives in my living room under a CRT television! Yes that works, but a NAS in the furnace room that is accessible from “smart TVs” and everyone’s mobile devices is pretty nice. No more fan noise either.
While true, neither backups nor checksums are exclusive to hosting anything.
Mainly just multi-device access.
I see that cosmos advertises running your apps on a vpn built-in. That might be worth looking into. When I switched to self-hosting everything on my “tailnet” and closed incoming ports, a lot of the nice features of Yunohost for maintaining DNS and certs for the various apps stopped being that useful. In this day and age, I think being able to self-host and experiment within a safe VPN environment instead of on the open internet is the way to go.
Hot take: For personal use, I see no value at all in “availability,” only data preservation. If a drive fails catastrophically and I lose a day waiting for a restore from backups, no one is going to fire me. No one is going to be held up in their job. It’s not enterprise.
However, redundancy doesn’t save you when a file is deleted, corrupted, ransom-wared or whatever. Your raid mirror will just copy the problem instantly. Snapshots and 3,2,1 backups are what are important to me because when personal data is lost, it’s lost forever.
I really do think a lot of hobbyists need to focus less on highly available redundancy and more on real backups. Both time and money are better spent on that.
Absolutely! I should have said both the dns and certificate are subdomain wildcards. Thanks for clarifying.
In addition to a reverse proxy with mandatory TLS and some IP filtering, I have headscale running on a sub domain (subdomain dns is a wildcard). The main domain is a different, static web page, so anyone scanning IPs for headscale wont see its a headscale machines unless they can guess the subdomain. I figure that might be useful in case theres a zero day that pops up. It just looks like a regular web server to drive-by script kiddies.
Yunohost for sure. And start simple. One service
I would generally keep sync and backup separate, but if you are using a cow filesystem like zfs on your unraid machine, it could take reliable snapshots.
Restic is amazing. I use it to push to backblaze b2. I have a lot of redundant data (eg tar files of systems that are only slightly different) and it de-duplicates the data to an incredible degree.
What do you think of 2.5 and 10g Ethernet vs fiber between nodes in the home (I.e, between the modem and office switch, etc)?
I would say that WiFi is wonderful for those last few meters. A room with a wifi AP literally visible can perform fantastically for several devices in that room. It’s just that back-haul connection across the building back to the modem where WiFi should be down on the list like that. I keep seeing these “mesh” wifi access points that use 6ghz back-haul and shake my head. Better than just having a single access point, but probably asking for pain in most circumstances.
I have 3 access points in my house, where there’s no place where the signal has to go through more than 1 wall. They are fed via gigabit Ethernet back to the modem which acts as a 4th access point. That could be MoCA, and probably will eventually be fiber, but neither WiFi nor powerline would be fun for that. Wifi does short range great, whereas powerline is just a bad idea from the start.
There will be a Cable TV splitter where the coax comes into your house - possibly a basement or utility room. One cable in, several going out to the various rooms. If you put your modem there, then you can use all the coax runs in your house for MoCA networking.
You only need the MoCA for the back-haul between distant wifi access points or ethernet switches, not in every single room. Unless your walls are made from literal sheet metal, a wifi signal should get through at least one, and ethernet cables along the baseboard and under a doorway are fine too.
Powerline is so leaky it is basically wireless with wires. 14x3 is not a transmission line, but it does effectively turn your whole home electrical system into both a transmitting and receiving antenna that just happens to talk to it’s self. It’s an engineering nightmare.
Yeah, it’s great, fast, works with lots of local clients and has lots of plug ins for whatever esoteric need you might have. I can fly through the days articles very quickly with a handful of key presses.
Probably better to use them for their screen, firewalled off from everything except whatever is providing a dashboard or info display (e.g., homeassistant).