There’s no guarantee google will scrape and store encrypted messages, plus by not using an encrypted messenger you’re opening up your conversations to everyone else, not just potentially google.

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I do local backups to another drive, and online encrypted backups to cloud storage (I use backblaze B2)

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The cheapest way I can think of is a used PCIe HBA card and some SATA power extension cables. Probably $50 or so to connect 8 drives this way.

If you’re set on USB you can often get 4 bay enclosures for around $100 or so, that would the way I’d do it. The downside of single USB adapters is the sheer amount of wires and power supplies you’ll have.

I set up Plex/Jellyfin specifically to get away from having to manage media manually, it tracks watch states, gets subtitles, transcodes for me when I’m traveling, and does all of that for family too.

MPV is neat but its just a standard media player app like VLC, not really anywhere near the same concept as Jellyfin.

Seeding works fine without port forwarding. Just won’t be connecting to as many peers.

Also Thunderbird, but specifically the Betterbird fork.

It works well, its fast, its lightweight (like 100-200MB of RAM), and has lots of features.

I also have my calendar in it.

Oh I see what you mean yeah, I’ve never used NFS before with it.

Tailscale or Zerotier are the current best options I think.

Yeah it sounds nice but too much time investment for me.

I can install PBS client on any system but it requires manual setup and scheduling which I don’t want to do. When used with Proxmox that’s all handled for me.

Also I don’t think Proxmox cares about storage either, I just use ZFS which is completely standard under the hood.

No backup utility like PBS though, thats why I haven’t switched.

Intel AMT also works for out of band management on consumer hardware.

I don’t think I’ve ever had a quality brand PSU go out on me. Software RAID like MD or ZFS works fine on basically any hardware, and I wouldn’t use hardware RAID these days anyways.

I used to worry about that stuff and use enterprise hardware, but its just so expensive for decent performance, and so power hungry.

Like try and match even a budget i3-12100 or similar for single thread performance (needed for game servers mostly) and you really can’t with used enterprise gear. Plus that i3 has an iGPU that can handle a ton of transcoding tasks, and ML for stuff like immich search or frigate object detection. And it uses about 10w or less most of the time.

Yeah media is a good use case for it, and doesnt really need cache either.

It can’t, you lose space efficiency if the disks you add aren’t the same size as the old disks.

It has no parity, you can pair with snapraid but thats snapshot parity and not real-time parity. Depends on the use case if that would work or not.

Also no caching options.

The big thing is very easily mix and match different sizes of disks. ZFS as of recently can sort of do that, but its not as efficient.

Sure as long as its able to be unlocked, it doesnt matter that you already switched.

For #3 every service will say something like that, even with paid accounts.