Rust people seem to be focused mostly on identity politics and dividing people into groups that are then supposed to fight each other.

Yeah, this guy can eat my entire ass. This is the same language that fascists use to delegitimize anyone who isn’t straight and white.

Yeah, syncthing can do all of that except public share links. Run an instance on your NAS so there is always a sync target online.

I strongly recommend ZFS as a filesystem for this as it can handle your sync, backup, and quota needs very well. It also has data integrity guarantees that should frankly be table stakes in this application. Truenas is an easy way to accomplish this, and it can run docker containers and VMs if you like.

Tailscale is a great way to connect them all, and connect to your nas when you aren’t home. You can share devices between tailnets, so you don’t all have to be on the same Tailscale account.

I’ll caution against nextcloud, it has a zillion features but in my experience it isn’t actually that good at syncing files. It’s complicated to set up, complicated to maintain, and there are frequent bugs. Consider just using SMB file sharing (built into truenas), or an application that only syncs files without trying to be an entire office suite as well.

For your drive layouts, I’d go with big drives in a mirror. This keeps your power and physical space requirements low. If you want, ZFS can also transparently put metadata and small files on SSDs for better latency and less drive thrashing. (These should also be mirrored.) Do not add an L2ARC drive, it is rarely helpful.

The boxes are kinda up to you. Avoid USB enclosures if at all possible. Truenas can be installed on most prebuilt NAS boxes other than synology, presuming it meets the requirements. You can also build your own. Hot swap is nice, and a must-have if you need normies to work on it. Label the drive serial number on the outside so you can tell them apart. Don’t go for less than 4 bays, and more is better even if you don’t need them yet. You want as much RAM as feasibly possible; ZFS uses it for caching, and it gives you room to run containers and VMs.

Yeah, I’ll probably switch eventually I’m just trying to talk myself out of it because I don’t have the time to learn right now

I have a desktop, laptop, and a few VMs and servery things. Dotfile manager (yadm, which is a git wrapper) to sync personal settings, everything else I just do manually. The system-level configs are either different enough that standardizing them isn’t very helpful, or no more complicated than installing packages and activating services.

I like the idea of nixos, but I feel like it makes a bunch of daily sacrifices in order to optimize a task I do once every few years? I hardly ever get a new computer, but I install/uninstall/update/tweak packages on my system all the time. With a dotfile manager and snapshots, I get most of the benefit without any of the drawbacks.

The desktop environment is all the stuff like the taskbar, the settings menus, the application launcher, the login screen, that kind of thing. It’s the system level user interface.

You choose which one by which distro you download. Linux mint uses cinnamon, Ubuntu and fedora use gnome. There are “flavors” of Ubuntu and fedora that use KDE. That’s why I suggested ventoy: you can download a few different ones and boot into them without making a new thumb drive.

If you don’t feel like bothering with any of that, just use Linux mint. It’s good.

• before you switch, sort out your apps. Look at what you use on windows, see if it runs on Linux. If not, find a replacement that does and test it out.
• Most Linux distros can boot into a desktop from a thumb drive. You can play and test without touching your windows installation.
• in that vein, ventoy is neat. You can make a bootable drive and drop ISOs in a folder to boot from. No messing with etcher or whatever it’s called
• desktop environment matters as much as the distro. Check out gnome, KDE, and cinnamon.

Yeah, when someone is interested in switching I always advise them to sort out their apps first. Many Linux applications also run on windows, the reverse is rarely true.

That’s a lot of the reason you buy it, but RHEL is a paid product that you buy copies of.

https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/linux-platforms/enterprise-linux/how-to-buy#online

You haven’t heard of red hat? Or Ubuntu pro?

NAS at the parents’ house. Restic nightly job, with some plumbing scripts to automate it sensibly.

Shout out to nushell for building an entire shell around this idea!

Have you considered karakeep (formerly hoarder)? It does all of this really well - drop it a URL and it saves a copy. Has lists & tagging (can be done by AI if you want), IOS & android apps as well as browser extensions that make saving stuff super easy.

https://karakeep.app/

Broadly similar from a quick glance: https://www.amazon.pl/s?k=m-disc+blu+ray

My options look like this:

https://allegro.pl/kategoria/nosniki-blu-ray-257291?m-disc=tak

Exchange rate is 3.76 PLN to 1 USD, which is actually the best I’ve seen in years

I only looked how zfs tracks checksums because of your suggestion! Hashing 2TB will take a minute, would be nice to avoid.

Nushell is neat, I’m using it as my login shell. Good for this kind of data-wrangling but also a pre-1.0 moving target.

Tailscale deserves it, bitcoin absolutely does not

Where I live (not the US) I’m seeing closer to $240 per TB for M-disc. My whole archive is just a bit over 2TB, though I’m also including exported jpgs in case I can’t get a working copy of darktable that can render my edits. It’s set to save xmp sidecars on edit so I don’t bother with backing up the database.

I mostly wanted a tool to divide up the images into disk-sized chunks, and to automatically track changes to existing files, such as sidecar edits or new photos. I’m now seeing I can do both of those and still get files directly on the disk, so that’s what I’ll be doing.

I’d be careful with using SSDs for long term, offline storage. I hear they lose data if not powered for a long time. IMO metadata is small enough to just save a new copy when it changes

I’ve been thinking through how I’d write this. With so many files it’s probably worth using sqlite, and then I can match them up by joining on the hash. Deletions and new files can be found with different join conditions. I found a tool called ‘hashdeep’ that can checksum everything, though for incremental runs I’ll probably skip hashing if the size, times, and filename haven’t changed. I’m thinking nushell for the plumbing? It runs everywhere, though they have breaking changes frequently. Maybe rust?

ZFS checksums are done at the block level, and after compression and encryption. I don’t think they’re meant for this purpose.