The Homelab Show Episode 118: Backup Strategies

Hey Jay and Tom,
@Jay, I am interested as to how your Joplin setup is configured. I have a postgres docker database instance that jopling (also docker) uses and have never had any issues using either the windows or android apps. Sorry to hear about the egregious bugs you encountered.

do you guys also store your important data on a different filesystem or ZFS only?
my whole backup strategy was done with ZFS snapshot sending/pulling to other pools.
but since openzfs bug 15526 I started to backup my most important stuff to BTRFS additionally (single disk, maybe mirror sometime later)

Good topic, however one thing about your "mistrust" of Immutable backups. There are several systems out in the enterprise sphere that do in fact provide immutable storage. A Gartner leader in primary storage has settings that will make snapshots undeletable by anyone including their support people for a specified number of days. Another upper-right quadrant backup company provides no actual access to the underlying filesystem on its storage platform, when you restore backups, they are often presented in a sandbox way where you can access data, but it is a temporary only snapshot. If you wish to further secure it, you can enable a 2 person rule system for changing retention policies, what objects are protected, and even system settings. Now sure, with social engineering on the level of Hackers, you might some day lose data, these systems are for all intents and purposes immutable. They exist, you just have to cough up a lot of $$$ for them.

Awesome stuff… even if I don't understand all of it. xD

I'm a total noob, so if I got something wrong do excuse me…
I'm been toying with TrueNAS Scale on and old desktop and Syncthing settings to centralize things a bit here, it's going pretty alright.
TrueNAS Scale for whatever reason I could only install Syncthing and Tailscale so far… having lots of issue installing apps, but I'm suspending work on it since I'm planning to redo everything in a new machine made for purpose.
My old desktop I guess it's too old by now, it's a 10 yr old Haswell that consumes too much power, and I think a lot of the troubles I'm having comes from it being too old.

Anyways, on Syncthing, I'm not entirely sure if I got things correctly, but the other thing I like is being able to set distinct send and receive functions for each device. It's like, you can set stuff for two way sync, but I also have some folders that I want the server to dictate changes, and other folders for the device to dictate changes.
So for instance, I setup the camera folder on my smartphone to send and receive, but the same folder on my server to be send only. If I understood this right, this means the files on the server are not touched even if I do a cleanup on my smartphone.

This is particularly good if you have someone in the family that tends to start erasing stuff at random because they ran out of space in their smartphone storage… you keep everything they have in the server even if they erase something important by mistake.

Specifically for photos, there is likely a better app for this, but I haven't tested much yet. What I'm trying to replace here is the cloud storage or cloud photo stuff. I don't think Syncthing has this recourse, please tell me if it does, but something like being able to send things to the server while keeping a "virtual link" there just in case, aka device cleanup. I think Google Photos and the Synology app… what was it? Moments? They both have this functionality.

Anyways, good show guys! Good tips too. I plan on diving deeper into Nextcloud and all it's plugins when I setup the new machine…

i maintain about 600 project files all open in notepad++. it's rock solid! i have looked at alternatives and found nothing! notepad++ gives me the ability to custom color highlight bash heredocs. i have never figured out how to do that with other editors.