Unfortunately the work I’ve been involved in is all in a commercial setting and I don’t think it would behoove me to talk too much about it. One was a major replatforming of an enormous, global education platform. That succeeded but took 6 years, not 3. I’ve gone through major engine changes in various game studios; one of which was built from scratch, one which was kept up to date and had original GameCube code in it by the time we gave up on it and I’m in the middle of one right now, building a new platform for another education platform and refactoring a large VR platform. I wish I could detect a pattern of success - the only association I can find is with “patience”.

FWIW, I switched to Linux due to the amazing container support and haven’t looked back in terms of running software. The easy set up, tear down, and common monitoring makes it far more convenient to host stuff on Linux.

Run 19 but barely get over 5% usage even when transcoding 4K movies where the copyright has expired.

How long is a piece of string?

Rebuilding always takes a lot longer than you think. Refactoring always takes a lot longer than you think. I’ve been involved in failures and successes doing either.

For anyone finding this later. Unfortunately I’ve had to come off Actual :-(

While the gocardless syncing works really well, Actuals code for merging transactions is just too flaky for the banks I use. I end up having multiple similar transactions, done on the same day for the same amount, collapse into one and while you’re meant to be able to just set a starting date and an account value, Actual kept on syncing transactions from before the starting date.

I appreciate it’s open source and given I’ve paid nothing I should expect nothing. All good. But there wasn’t any engagement in the discord support section nor any response to bugs filed. It’s clearly under active development but the QA side doesn’t get enough attention that I could get it to work for me.

While I understand they don’t want to accept bugs without repro steps, there’s not enough scaffolding for capturing data and submitting issues inside the app.

I know I could get on that and fix it. I’m not complaining. I’m glad Actual works for many. But the transaction syncing totally did not work for the banks I used and so I’ve had to stop using it.

Been on PhotoPrism+ for a few years (90000 photos, 9000 videos). I use PhotoSync and it’s rock solid (although I go through an FTPS server for sync) - I’ve never ever had an issue with it. Yes, it’s third party, but for me it has just WORKED. Can also highly recommend PhotoPrism although I don’t edit many tags.

Looks great. Will definitely try out.

Day to day I just use LunaSea. Added convenience of being able to add a film from a phone.

Would HAVE. Could HAVE.

The original author tried to turn it into a business. Turns out that was next to impossible up against YNAB. Gave it to the community who’s keeping it current.

I’ve literally just switched to Actual (3 days in) after living out of a homemade Excel YNAB clone for years and years. Overall it’s great and the bank syncing really works (except with a weird issue around starting date and starting balance).

I love that it’s open source, E2E encrypted, self-hostable and the data lives in a SQLite database.

If I haven’t found any major snags, I’ll of course become a supporter in a couple of weeks.

Yes, it works a treat in the EU (due to PSD2, which mandates open banking) and U.K. (which is copy/pasting PSD2 to ensure their banks aren’t left behind).

I’m syncing with Handelsbanken UK, American Express, Lloyds, Monzo and Starling, all in the UK. Works a treat except most of the banks actually rate limit you to a couple of syncs per day.

The difference is that there is SOME accountability in the West and we can, to an extent, influence who leads us, especially in Europe.

So if flagrant misuse does appear, there’s a much higher risk of it being discovered and of heads rolling in the west.

Think of the number of exposed scandals in the West and compare that to China.

And I’m not throwing shit China’s way and thinking the West infallible. I’ve been to China plenty and worked with awesome Chinese people plenty. There’s a lot to love in China.

But let’s not get lost in whataboutisms. Where would you rather raise your children?!

You can milk anything with nipples!

I pay about £2.50 for 700+ GB storage, with about 2-10 GB of ingress every month. Storage alone is only £1.40. That’s using OVH’s “Cloud Archive” product; they also have a product called Cold Storage which is a smidge cheaper but doesn’t offer updating of existing data, so according to my projections based on the class of data I am archiving it wouldn’t be cheaper in the long term.

I know - it’s unreal how much people confuse Swiss banking privacy with Swiss privacy laws in general. FADP is weaker than GDPR IMHO.

I just have a smaller dataset using the same settings, which I try to recover a couple of times/year.

It’s not perfect as recovery exercises go … but it feels safe enough for me.

I’ve used backblaze for years and regularly run recovery exercises. Never had a problem.

However, to avoid any fears, I store remote backups in two locations (the other one being OVH, a large French cloud provider).

My data retention regime:

• Mirrored disks in local NAS.
• Continually (every night) copy to Backblaze and OVH.
• Once/year, copy all local NAS data to offline disks (ie disks that are plugged into a tray only during the copy) to avoid a file locking/encryption infection that could spread to the online files.

Dunno about affordable but you can usually find some decently priced 1L Dell Optiplex micro systems. I’ve got one running under my desk 24/7. Great Linux support.

I’ve already paid for a lifetime license of Plex. Is it worth considering a switch?

If you fund, you influence.

Scale. Look at a programming language like Zig … tiny, but managing to have three people full time.