MentalEdge

Neat! That was a dealbreaker back when I last tried it.

I use Jellyfin with the Symfonium mobile client.

Navidrome is popular but does not support multi-tags for some fields, like artists.

1. There is no “special” benefit to a pre-built NAS. They have convenient software but there is nothing exceptional about them. They’re just computers with storage drive slots. Using a bunch of external drives via a USB hub would be fine. But is that your only expansion option on the system you have? Access speeds via USB, especially if using a hub, won’t be ideal. It’ll certainly work, though. You can also get enclosures to put full size HDDs in, which can connect to an existing system.

2. RAID is still the way to go, but since you don’t need much storage, I’d start with RAID 1, not 5. 5 will require a rebuild with a new drive if something goes wrong, while RAID 1 will work with 2 drives and give you complete mirroring. Since you intend to have a “local” backup copy anyway, why not just skip that and use RAID 1? It’s literally the same thing, except it’ll actually provide uptime in case of failure, unlike a backup drive or raid 5.

3. So RAID 5 plus a local backup, plus another offsite? This is overkill IMO. (Not the offsite backup that’s good. But raid+local copy. Just use two drives and mirror them using whatever you prefer.) In your place, I think I’d go with BTRFS in raid1c2 mode. This is like raid1, in that with two drives, you only get the capacity of one drive. But, the “c2” means that each data block is mirrored to two drives. With more than two drives, you can expand storage. (With three 2TB drives you’d get 3TB) You don’t get as much available storage as with raid5, but you get expandability, which you normally don’t with raid1. And you get uptime in case of failure without an array rebuild (though for this you must mount the volume with the “degraded” option, unlike actual raid using mdadm). You also get filesystem snapshots.

4. You intend to do this manually? That is fine. My current solution is a second NAS at my dad’s home, to which my system is backed up daily using Kopia. Kopia deduplicates and compresses the backups, efficiently keeping versions up to two years back. The simplest version of this would be a router that can host an FTP server using an external drive in its usb port. This way you could automate off-site backup and have it happen more frequently. Asus routers can do this, and even come with free dynamic DNS and automatic https with letsenrypt. You literally just plug it into WAN somewhere, and you’ll be able to back up to it over the internet.

Finally, just some mentions.

MDADM, is what you’d use to create a software RAID array.

BTRFS has built-in multi-device storage, of which only single, raid0, and raid1 are stable. Do not use the raid5 and 6 modes. While named raid, the modes differ from actual raid. BTRFS is able to convert from one mode to another, and can add drives in any mode (though will need to “balance” the drives after changes, to make additional capacity available). It is also able to evict drives. It will not auto-mount a volume after drive failure, and requires the “degraded” option be added.

Mergerfs can be used to merge filesystems to expand storage non-destructively. It is able to arbitrarily combine volumes of any type, to combine their capacity. This way, it can for example be used to expand a raid1 array by combining it with a single disk, or another raid1 array, or whatever else. This can be done temporarily, as the combined volume can also be disassembled non-destructively, with each file simply remaining on whatever drive they were on.

Didn’t there use to be an unlimited tier?

Odds?

Just look it up, or tell me what you have.

Regardless of what you have, the “odds” are good.

If you have something unusual that causes problems, that’s too bad, but it doesn’t stop the rest of us from having a good time. And now that I’m on linux, I can make sure something will work before I buy it, and if it doesn’t, I can return it.

It’s only at the time of when you switch you need to think about whether your existing hardware will work.

Linux does. Not all, but a lot, and more every day.

It’s been years now, and it still hits me sometimes how insanely nice it is that my computers now work the way I want them to.

That depends entirely on the service.

Nothing prevents the password from being hashed client-side, only ever sending the hash to the service.

I think the only passkey I have is stored in my VaultWarden. Though it only works in browsers atm.

Doesn’t a normal modern password, hashed, essentielly do the same thing?

No sane service has your actual password.

With nextcloud in particular, nextcloud is not just nextcloud.

It’s a bunch of additional optional services that may or may not work as-is on Synology. And the Synology package won’t come with all of them.

With docker, adding (or removing) additional services, such as Nextcloud Office, is comparatively simple.

In that case, something is invalidating the login. Are you sure that it is happening due to leaving your LAN, and not just coinciding with that?

Does restarting the laptop log you out, or temporarily disconnecting from the internet? Could you test by switching to a wifi hotspot on your phone, and switching back, for example?

The client stores your session token in the OS credentials manager (kwallet for linux kde, for example) and the issue can lie there, as well.

That’s definitely not how it should work. Leaving your LAN should not invalidate a session.

Is this in your browser, or are you talking about the desktop client?

It’s not federated tho?

What do they mean when they call it that?

Why tf would I want capcut?

That’s the one.

I also need to work out how to do automatic certificate renewal and if that’s even worth doing

This is what certbot is for. For example, with nginx, you just set up the webserver to be reachable via your domain.

You then install and run certbot, and it will aquire, install and configure, and then set itself up to auto-renew, a certificate. All with just one command.

With Nextcloud specifically I also don’t like the fact that you can’t change the domain after the initial setup

Yes you can?

I’ve done it thrice now.

Is this some limitation of the docker AIO stack?

FolderSync pairs nicely if you want some sync features on android.

On a desktop or laptop I’d just mount it as a drive.

If you really want automatic sync with offline availability, the Nextcloud desktop client has been solid for years now.

Indeed.

I’m not saying there aren’t NASes that do this. Unfortunately, there absolutely are.

No sane NAS should work that way.

Unless you have a giant raid array, where you need all the drives running at the same time on the same system, plugging in a single raid 1 member, for example, via usb to sata adapter, should let you access its contents just fine.

Provided you’re on an OS that can read the file system. That can require some extra effort on windows.

But yeah. Beware of the pre-built NASes. The vendor lock-in is real.

The video has been recorded, but is not out yet. Linus talked about it on the latest WAN show and on social media.