I personally prefer printed out books of our photos. We are missing quite a few years due to life getting in the way, but the end goal is to have actual books of photos with titles like ‘Our family in 2018’ and ‘Sports of our first born at 2022’. In europe we have a company called ‘ifolor’ where you can design and order printouts of your photos. They’re not really cheap, but the quality is pretty damn good. And their offerings go to pretty decent sized photo albums, up to A3 size and 180 pages (which is over 200€). So, not cheap, but at least so far their quality has been worth the money.

And they have cheaper options too, but personally I think it’s worth the money to get the best quality you can for printouts. And even the smallest and cheapest option is far superior over not having anything at all due to hardware failure or whatever.

I still listen to the Thriller album sometimes, and though it is always freighted with the context of what came later

I’m very much aware of the controversy around MJ, but in the end he was cleared on all the charges. There’s obviously a ton of things which are problematic, to say the least, but in my personal opinion he was a victim of the system too. There’s absolutely things to condem him for, but I don’t think he was a bad person in the end. Just someone who really needed some help which wasn’t there. Britney Spears would be a better comparison than Kanye.

And there’s quite a big gap between being a problematic human being who created (ambiguously) some of the best art around and someone who straight up wants to make a statement of being a bigger natzi than Elon.

After reading the previous discussion I think that you should get more than single drive to store cold backups. That way you can at least spread out the risk of single drive failing. 2TB spinning drives are pretty cheap today and if you have, for example, 4 of them, you can buy one now, write your backups to it and in 6 months buy another, write data on that and so on.

This way you’ll have drives with year or two difference on purchase date, so it’s pretty unlikely all of them fail at once and a single drive gets powered on and checked every other year or so. My personal experience is that spinning drives are pretty stable on the shelf, but I wouldn’t rely on them for decades. And of course even with multiple drives you’ll still want to replace them every 3-5 years each. Plus with multiple drives, if I were to build setup like that, I’d set up some sort of scripts or other solution where I can just plug the thing in and doubleclick an icon on desktop to refresh the data and maybe get a notification automatically that the drive you’re using should be replaced.

And for actual, long term storage, printouts are the way to go. At least in here you can get books made out of photo paper with your pictures. That’s one media which is actually stable over long period and using them doesn’t require a lot of technical knowledge nor hardware. But I’d still keep digital copies around, as the printouts aren’t resistant to things like house fire or water damage.

Personally I’m running postfix+dovecot+amavis -setup managed by ispconfig3 running on a Debian VPS from hetzner. I think more important than having a ‘clean’ IP is to have clean domain name attached to it, but your mileage may vary.

This seems to be a common point of view for email self hosting.

However, my own experience is a whole another thing. Sure, my hosts have been on every spam list imaginable, mostly with Microsoft, but just a week ago I migrated the whole setup to new VPS and while there’s still a thing or two I’ll need to iron out the emails are running just fine. Biggest issue was that I forgot to add IPv6 DNS records for the VPS and thus got blocked by gmail, but they gave a clear error why that was and once I fixed the problem it’s been smooth sailing.

With current domains I’ve been running things since 2016 or 2018 and even commercially. It’s mostly problem free and things just work, Microsoft being the bigest ass on to work with. For example last october/november they decided to reject everything from one of my servers but both their JMRP portal and support claimed that there’s nothing wrong with our server. It took couple of days to clear without any definitive explanation. But beyond that, on various environments since 2009 (I think) it’s been mostly problem free hosting.

Sure, hosting email for anyone requires at least some understanding on how things should work (both technically and ethically/legally) and the skillset needed is a bit more complex than hosting a web site to public internet, but it’s still something practically anyone can do if they really want to.

And sure, there’s a ton of stuff you need to get right. And then there’s cases when you miss something and your ‘Contact me’ web form becomes a spammer heaven and your servers end up sending few million viagra ads around the net and your IP/domain is on every shitlist there is. It takes some persistence and time to clean that up and learn from the experience, but it’s not the end of the world.

Self hosting your email is perfectly viable, it can be done regardless of google/microsoft, and I hightly recommend doing that. Email is one of the last “old” fronts to the net where everything is not centralized to a single/few actors. But you really need to know what you’re doing. Copy’n’paste commands to set up whatever the latest hot stuff is on docker containers just isn’t enough.

True, but more often than not mozilla should have newer packages on their repository than any distribution. And the main problem still is that Ubuntu changed apt and threw snap in to the mix where it doesn’t belong.

But it’s not obvious either. When I say ‘apt install firefox’, specially after adding their repository to sources.list, I’d expect to get a .deb from mozilla. Silently overriding my commands rubs me in a very wrong way.

If only there was some other alternative than throw my old stuff in the bin.

Edit: I missed the ‘un’ on ‘unsupported’. It’s supposed to be a joke.

I kinda-sorta finalized my migration to a smaller setup with my mail+web server. I’ve been running a small MSP business for several years and as customers flee right and left mostly to microsoft (due to 365 setup pricing) it’s been in a decline for quite a while. So, I finally pulled the plug and shut down the business side of things and downscaled that to a single VPS with a handful of domains, email service and a few simple wodrpress sites.

Also I kinda-sorta moved all of my photo archive of 20+ years to immich and set up a backup scheme for it, which is now (only) 2-1-1. I also need more storage for that thing, but it needs to wait for few days until paycheck and after that migration I can finish importing all the photos I have laying around. That also requires some reconfiguration of my disk arrays, copying couple of terabytes from system to another and back again, but that’s relatively easy thing to do, but it takes “a while” to accomplish.

After that there’s a long list of things to do, but mostly I’ll spend my free time and money to improve the current setup as quickly as possible in the immediate future.

True. And there’s also a ton of devices around which don’t trust LetsEncrypt either. There’s always edge cases. For example, take a bit older photocopier and it’s more than likely that it doesn’t trust on anything on this planet anymore and there’s no easy way to update CA lists even if the hardware itself is still perfectly functional.

That doesn’t mean that your self-signed CA, in itself, would be technically any less secure than the most expensive Verisign certificate you can find. And yes, there’s a ton of details and nuances here and there, but I’m not going to go trough every technical detail about how certificates work. I’m not an expert on that field by any stretch even if I do know a thing or two and there’s plenty of material online to dig deep into the topic if you want to.

Valid certificate is anything you trust. Any CA which you can trust is no more or less secure than the one you get from LE, so for the private network you can just happily sign your own certificates and just distribute the CA to your devices.

Ubuntu or something based on it

I would not recommend ubuntu, specially on this case. System updates, snapd mostly, have gone downhill and it’s nearly impossible to avoid reboots for extended periods. Debian seems to be still as solid as it’s always been.

Laptops use lithium-ion batteries and (at least your Average Joe’s and majority of commercial units too) UPS uses sealed Lead Acid. If lithium ion battery goes belly up it’ll burn your house down. If lead acid battery does the same, at worst, it’ll leak a bit of corrodive fluids to whatever it’s on top of.

There’s commercial size li-ion UPS’s too, but they require quite a lot of hardware around them to be used safely. Search from youtube (or whatever you like) a cell phone battery explosion and then scale that up to a fridge-sized cell-phone. It’s quite a bit of steel and concrete to contain that amount of energy. And the funny thing about li-ion fires is that lithium ions reacts quite violently with water and the battery contains all the chemicals to keep the fire going, oxygen included.

So, yeah, UPS is a whole another thing to manage than a laptop battery.

Hello?

If you can’t access the hardware physically and you don’t have someone on site who can work on it, just drop the idea and get a VPS or whatever cloud based. No matter what hardware you plan to use. Anything and everything can happen. Broken memory module, odd power surge, rodents or bugs messing up with the system, moisture or straight up water leak corroding something, fan failure overheating the thing and so on.

There’s only one single fact on the business that I’ve learned over 20something years I’ve been working with IT: All hardware fails. No exceptions. The only question is ‘when’. And when the time comes you need someone to have physical access to the stuff.

I mean, sure, your laptop might run just fine for several years without problems or it might have shipping damage over that 3000km and it’ll break in a week. In either case, unless you have someone hands on the machine, it’s not going to do much.

It would be difficult to recommend Immich as a gallery app to someone who doesn’t have experience in selfhosting.

You already have plenty of responses, but immich is not an gallery app. I’m in the process of migrating my photo libraries to immich and it’s 20+ years of memories. Some are originally taken by film camera and then scanned, others are old enough that camera phones just didn’t exist and we had “compact” digital cameras. Then there’s photos taken with DSLR and drone and obviously all of the devices have changed multiple times over the years, so relying on just a single device is just not going to work over time.

All of those require some other system to store, organize, back up and enjoy than the device itself. And, as I have family, storing them on just my desktop would mean that no one else around would have easy access to them. And with immich I can easily share photos around when I carry DSLR with me in a family gathering or whatever.

And then there’s the obvious matter of having enough storage. Even my desktop doesn’t have a spare terabyte right now to store everything, I need the hardware anyways, so it just makes sense to keep them separated from my workstation which I can now do whatever I want with without worrying I’d lose any of those precious memories. And for the server part, I’m having one around anyways for pihole, home assistant, nextcloud to store/back up other data and so on, so for me it’s the most convenient approach to run immich server on there too.

And for the backup side of things. I’ve tried manual backups with various stuff over the years. It’s just not going to work for me. I either forget or life gets in the way or something other happens and then I’m several days or weeks behind the ‘schedule’. With dedicated server I don’t have to do anything, everything is running automatically at the background while I’m sleeping or doing something else more interesting than copying over a bunch of files.

Oh, no. The data is on my local server and VPS is a whole different thing. I just brought up that I already use hetzner services, so it would be convenient to stick with a single provider.

As a service it’s not free, but apparently I’ve misread the proxmox website in a hurry. I’m not too familiar with their licensing, but even if I’d get a VPS and enough storage for it to run a proxmox backup server it’s still more expensive than just a raw storage from somewhere.

You are absolutely correct. I don’t mind the few GB’s worth of data for the operating system, a single video with my drone is likely more than that and it’s not something you can deduplicate nor compress very well. If I really wanted I think it should be possible to squeeze the operating system at least below 2GB, but it’s just not worth the effort. I just want that the memories over 20+ years I have on the thing to remain.

Proxmox backup server (at least from proxmox) is way more expensive than any raw storage option. For the external drives, I won’t do that. The server has RAID setup on disks and adding another local disk wouldn’t achieve anything on my situation as I need an off-site copy.