What features in Joplin do you like using the most?

There are a TON of note taking apps and understanding what features you value the most might be helpful in pointing you in a direction.

1. heck u

2. my credit card hasn’t left my wallet so fast in a while

If someone else buys the domain, then your instance likely won’t exist anymore and you’ll have to get a new domain.

Spend the $12/yr on a .com, it’s a lot less of a headache in the long-run.

Honestly I’m just super lazy and a bit ADHD. The more work a chore requires, the less likely I’m going to actually do it, so it’s just a personal hack.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with any approach as long as you can commit to doing it. It’s just a matter of finding something that you’re able to stick with. Maintaining cold backups is annoying lol

Yeah, and your way can give you a free off-site backup.

I guess if you really wanted to optimize to minimize the number of backups to take, you could just take one of the drives to the offsite location as part of the rotation.

Say if you have 3 drives, you’d always keep your second oldest copy off-site. You want your most recent backup on-site for convenience of restoration, and you want your oldest on-site to use to take a backup without driving to your buddy’s place first.

Let’s say your drives backup schedule is quarterly and with 3 drives, and the backup dates are: Drive A: Jan 2023, Drive B: April 2023, Drive C: July 2023

Now it’s October. Use Drive A for your backup since it is the oldest. Now Drive B becomes your oldest

Take Drive C, the now-second-oldest, to your buddy off site.

Bring back Drive B from your buddy’s place since it used to be the second-oldest and is now the current oldest

When it’s time to rotate the drives for backups, do a backup to the oldest drive first.

Take , do your backup to your oldest drive locally first, then drive offsite to drop off your now-formerly-newest drive, and bring back the off-site drive as the oldest.

It might be worth keeping a text file log of what’s on there at least.

Music is almost by-far the easiest to “restore”. In the event you lose everything and don’t want to spend time restoring it all, you can fling money at Spotify/etc and use a service that automagically imports playlists.

The other stuff? That’s going to be insanely annoying to back up and insanely boring to rebuild if it’s a super-huge collection. Personally, if it’s something I think I’m going to watch in the future I’m buying the bluray/dvd and keeping it on the shelf (more-so for that it works as a conversation piece).

I only care to have a solid backup strategy of stuff where there is a 0.0% chance to rebuild like personal documents, photos, and videos.

Fortunately, since you “only” have 2 10TB drives (I’m assuming as a RAID1 array), consider this:

1. Buy a 12/14/16TB external drive (just in case you upgrade disk space in the future, you’re using this drive so infrequently it’ll last you a few years easily)
2. Take a full disk backup, put a physical label on it with the date, store the drive in a safe
3. Wait 6 months, buy a second 12/14/16TB external drive – you’re almost guaranteed to get a drive in a different batch, and if you really want to amp up the paranoid factor, go for a different brand.
4. Back up your data to the brand new drive, put a label on it with the date, toss it in a safe
5. Wait 6 months, grab the oldest drive, replace it’s contents with a new backup, throw new label on it, toss back in safe.

Generally speaking, this will give you at least 1 backup that’s no older than 12 months, and 1 backup that’s no older than 6 months. The only risky time where you’d lose a backup is when you’re replacing the oldest backup.

IMO this 6mo strategy is a fine compromise on cost, effort, and duration of loss of data but tweak as you see fit.

Then there’s the second option I provided with Zoneminder and Amcrest cameras.

One of the easier options is going to be Ubiquiti’s ecosystem. You’ll be tied into it, but the video data is local. You can self-host the Unifi software yourself or grab a Cloud Key G2 Plus, which is a tiny ARM box running Ubiquiti’s software. Then you buy Ubiquiti’s cameras. At least as of a couple years ago, you could not pair this with any standard camera though.

If you want a fair bit more effort but more flexibility, Zoneminder is an option. Most Amcrest cameras stream a feed over RTSP. You just need to configure Zoneminder to stream the feed.

Same! I think it works very well.

It depends on what country you’re in. If you’re in the US, the National Weather Service provides an excellent no-bullshit “please don’t abuse this” API.

https://www.weather.gov/documentation/services-web-api

If you just want a site to pull the weather down: https://weather.gov/

I’m really not sure what you’d gain from self-hosting this unless you own your own weather station though since you’d have to reach an authoritative source that provides the forecasts eventually.

So first, what is your objective? What do you want to learn? Self-hosting is extremely open ended.

Now if you’re wanting an avenue into learning entry-level networking, you can try finding Network+ study materials. Unfortunately I haven’t touched this in over 14 years so I don’t have any direct links, but literally any study book or guide, even if its a few years old, should help get you started.

What useful apps would it need? This is a streaming box first and foremost. Branching out a little bit, it has the ability to play some ported (basically) iPhone games. It can run Steam Link. There’s some stuff like Speedtest.

I haven’t tried it. AFAIK Netflix won’t work on iOS if you have a VPN active so I don’t have high hopes for Netflix.

If you run a media server that isn’t publicly exposed, it lets you jump in to browse stuff w/o needing to forward additional ports.

Another use is if you want to bring the device with you on vacation. You can VPN back home and have your traffic exit out of your house which may be useful for streaming services that require traffic be “in the same household”.