Unless you need the super-compactness of a mini PC, the Small Form Factor is a significantly greater value.

You get more horsepower, more space, and better cooling.

And they tend to be very quiet. Mine only has some fan noise when converting video, and it’s always running 2-5 VM’s (mostly Windows).

I disagree with cold backup drives.

In my experience, cold drives fail more often than warm drives. This is why all my data replication is always warm.

All backup solutions should be regulator tested, otherwise you don’t know if you have a backup.

Others have mentioned backup, I’m going to reiterate that.

Backup, backup, backup.

I have an (old) NAS that frankly I don’t trust to not die. Then again, anything can die, so it’s just one component of my data duplication.

I also have my server which is authoritative for all data, which is then duplicated (on schedules) to the NAS and 2 external drives, so I have 4 local copies.

All mobile devices sync important data to my server.

Power

My NAS idles about 15w. It’s 5 drives, so honestly that’s quite low and tells us it spins down drives.

My server idles at 20w, using NVME as the boot drive, a large data drive, and an SSD for virtual machines. It’s power supply maxes at 80w (which it approaches when I’m converting videos with handbrake).

Before this my server was an old gaming desktop that idled around 100w.

So my server today is a 5 year old Small-Form-Factor Desktop that I picked up for $50. I paid more for the RAM I added. It has enough room internally for one 3.5" drive and the 2.5" SSD…

It’s also quiet - the CPU and power supply fans double as case fans.

Oh, agreed.

There’s some other stuff at play with the minis (shared family photos, backup to each other, etc) that I’m going to use as an enticement to get them to learn to use these tools.

Once they learn that, I can slip in some other things, piecemeal, depending on what each person clicks with.

To be fair, you’re talking about root - which is always tricky.

I run rooted Pixels, and so far updates haven’t been a problem.

So far…

OMV is an OS, and it’s a version of Ubuntu Debian.

Bold move, Cotton!

(Not really, Lineage updates are the most seamless I’ve ever seen).

Uggh, feel bad for them.

I’ve tried for years to get friends and family to have their data sit in a single point in the house and use backup services. That would be a massive improvement.

Family won’t listen, so I’m building minicomputers for them all that will handle it. Just have to configure their devices to store data there.

This started because one sibling asked about transferring photos from a phone, and I started documenting how to use Resilio and Syncthing.

I don’t do upgrades (well, not in the sense most people think of them).

My approach is that upgrades are too risky, things always break. It’s also why I don’t permit auto updates on anything. I’d rather do manual updates than dedicated time. Keeping things working is more important, and I have backups.

I run everything virtualized (as much as I can), so I can test upgrades by cloning a system and upgrading the clone. If that fails, I simply build a new system based on some templates I keep. Run in parallel, copy config and data as best I can, then migrate. Just migrated my Jellyfin setup this way.

This is a common methodology in enterprise, which virtualization makes a lot easier for us self hosters.

I haven’t had a disruption from updates/upgrades in 5 years.

Sync it to a cloud

I wouldn’t trust the disconnected drives. They fail more often when offline than on, in my experience.

Granted it’s your 3rd backup, so it’s a smaller risk.

Syncthing or Resilio Sync for photo/file backup from phone. Both work amazingly well.

The problem is they are almost never good, as everyone can read the same info 4x faster than someone can present it (best case), and 10x faster isn’t unusual.

Source: Former technical trainer - I’ve read a lot about instructional methodologies. Video is the lowest common denominator that’s all. It can be useful for things that have a visual component, and self hosting has very little of that.

Seems there are 2 kinds - video links with almost no text, just farming visits, and video links with a wall of text.

Both suck. Videos, in general, suck.

So much of what goes on here needs text, lots of it. Video is slow and cumbersome.

Thing is, even using this new app it’s still ST underneath, using their Discovery servers. That’s as big an issue as anything.

To your point, the developer of an iOS Syncthing client (Möbius) has financially support ST development for at least 3 years that I know of. I don’t know how much, but they use it for their own clients, so it’s important to them.

My only concern would be the Discovery servers.

I have no intent to upgrade from my current version (1.27.9) as it’s been fine for years now.

It works, does what I need. There was an update a few months ago, but it offers nothing I need, and would only cause me a ton of work and re-testing to ensure it works as it currently does.

Apps don’t need continuous updating if they work.

I have an ancient Drobo.

Believe it or not, it’s only sound is the fan, which I can’t hear even when it’s on.

SSD will still generate heat, so will need a fan.

I think the nerd/tinker space today is stuff like self-hosting, local storage, return from cloud.

Apps that don’t phone home to someone else’s server, keeping your contacts, calendar, shopping list, etc on your own stuff.

We could, if someone cared to put in the effort to make that happen.

Be that “someone” .