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…
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.
Installing apps in Windows is a privileged process. This keeps the average user from corrupting a system.
The only users that can install apps are ones with Install Apps permission (I forget what it’s actually called). Anyone in the Admin group has this. The group Users does not.
In a business/domain environment, very few people get local admin rights. For a home user best practice would be to run as a User or at most Power User, and only do admin level stuff when logged in as an Admin.
No one does this, of course. (I certainly don’t, even though I know better. It’s just easier to not do risky things and maintain backups).
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.
I’ve had better luck using MKV for my Samsung TV.
But yea, Mp4 is generally more compatible.
It’s shocking how little resolution plays into quality. I’ve re-encoded some videos down to 480 and played them on a 65" TV and they look fine.
I can also make videos look terrible by just trying to save space by reducing the quality level of the conversion while retaining high resolution (1080).
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.
To them, you can hold eye contact, so it’s working as they prefer.
Define share?
Keep all files in sync between two points?
Enable ad-hoc access to all files, or a subset?
Enable the Funnel feature on your Tailscale.
Exactly.
Practically every piece of “lifetime” software I’ve paid for has gone this route.
Oh no, someone else could possibly play media from my media server, if they have the exact link for it!
Yea, not ideal, but not exactly the end of the world.
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.