Perhaps I’ve been naieve.

I have local incremental backups and rsync to the remote. Doesn’t syncthing have incremental also? You have a good point about syncing a destroyed disk to your offsite backup. I know S3 has some sort of protection, but haven’t played with it.

I have tailscale mostly set up. What’s the issue with USB drives? I’ve got a raspberry pi on the other end with a RO SD card so it won’t go bad.

This reminds me that I need alerts monitoring set up. ; -)

I’ll have to check this out.

I attended some LUGs before covid and could see something like this being facilitated there. It also reminds me of the Reddit meetups that I never partook in.

That’s something that I hadn’t considered!

I wasn’t aware of the untrusted setting. That sounds like a good option.

Yes. It’s the “put a copy somewhere else” that I’m trying to solve for without a lot of cost and effort. So far, having a remote copy at a relative’s is good for being off site and cost, but the amount of time to support it has been less than ideal since the Pi will sometimes become unresponsive for unknown reasons and getting the family member to reboot it “is too hard”.

Take some time and really analyze your threat model. There are different solutions for each of them. For example, protecting against a friend swiping the drives may be as simple as LUKS on the drive and a USB key with the unlock keys. Another poster suggested leaving the backup computer wide open but encrypting the files that you back up with symmetric or asymmetric, based on your needs. If you’re hiding it from the government, check your local laws. You may be guilty until proven innocent in which case you need “plausible deniability” of what’s on the drive. That’s a different solution. Are you dealing with a well funded nation-state adversary? Maybe keying in the password isn’t such a bad idea.

I’m using LUKS with mandos on a raspberry PI. I back up to a Pi at a friend’s house over TailScale where the disk is wide open, but Duplicity will encrypt the backup file. My threat model is a run of the mill thief swiping the computers and script kiddies hacking in.

You’re doing God’s work!

Over my career, it’s sad to see how the technical communications groups are the first to get cut because “developers should document their own code”. No, most can’t. Also, the lack of good documentation leads to churn in other areas. It’s difficult to measure it, but for those in the know, it’s painfully obvious.

I feel like everyone’s missing the point. Even 20 minutes a week is almost a day a year of your life sitting at a charger. I fill up my gas tank once a week and it takes maybe 5 minutes which is 4 hours a year that I spend feeding my car, staring at the stupid advertisements for a bacon-egg-and-cheese cinnamon roll covered in maple syrup or whatever other impulse items lie within the gas station. 5 minutes isn’t enough to do anything whereas if I plan for 20 minutes, I’m going to go get a tea or something.

On the other hand, something we can all agree is a waste of time is, “how many hours of your life have been/will be spent sitting at a traffic light?”

I had one from Sony a long time ago. It even had a cable you could attach between two of 'em (600 CDs!) so that it could seamlessly start playing another track while loading the next song. I dropped it during a move and the next time I opened the door, it spit gears at me. I had intended to fix it some day, but started watching Hoarders and decided it wasn’t worth it.

Can you elaborate on the scenario this is solving for? Isn’t software RAID a performance hit?

This, and addition to company sponsored anti features, governments can ask or force companies to add back doors, unbeknownst to the consumers. For this reason (and others), I’ll only ever trust open source software for security software, like VPN.

There was a news station I saw while vacationing in the Smokies. They called it “news with a heart”. They did all the same news stories, bit didn’t dwell on the death toll or show video of the carnage. It was the first time I didn’t become enraged by the news.

We have a drinking game for the NBC Nightly News. Drink any time they say “breaking news”, “disaster”, “epidemic” or show people crying. You won’t make it through the news.

I have. I was kindergarten-aged and my friend was over and she didn’t flush. That was also the day that I learned that girls poop…a lot!

I made one of these when I was a kid using a ton of rubber bands. One of the “arms” flew off and hit me in the face. It was definitely not as fun as the cartoons advertised.

I work at a big bank. I bank at a local credit union.

I don’t think they’re being pointlessly pedantic. I’ve been around POS systems and some people call it by the letters, P.O.S. & others by the acronym, sounding like “pause”. Nobody assumes you’re talking about a Piece of Shit when you say “pause”. Also for OOO (“oooh”) vs O.O.O., which doesn’t roll off the tongue, but you don’t sound like Casper.

Now, being pointlessly pedantic, I find it interesting to think that if we continue to use the word acronym for initialisms, then the word acronym will actually be initialisms! English is weird!