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I spent a good number of years thinking this was the right solution and heading towards it. I had drawn up designs for my house, solar installation and half a r

by baz00 3y ago

I spent a good number of years thinking this was the right solution and heading towards it. I had drawn up designs for my house, solar installation and half a rack of kit. This was to run a domain for my immediate family and all services including media storage and streaming. Solar was going to be 100% grid independent i.e. not some crappy provider based install. The infra was all targeted at Debian. Then I got two sick parents and a divorce on my hands. Then I realised exactly how much time, energy, money and headspace managing all this crap really took out of my life because I had to spend it on other stuff instead not out of choice but necessity. One of the absolute killers for all of this wasn't really the cost and complexity but the time to curate my data and deal with it is incredibly high if you have a lot of it. One of the worst sub-parts was the question from the kids: I want this music and then going to get it and deal with it and then distribute it to everyone. This would take hours a month to manage. I came out of the other side of this somewhat unscathed thankfully and with a much larger pile of cash than I thought I was going to. So a year long project took place. I combed through several TB of data, from myself and my parents and did a huge minimisation effort. I deleted all the fuzzy ass photos, pictures of stuff no one cared about, all the films I'd already watched, deleted all the crap music, deleted scanned paperwork dating back to 1989 I'd never need, everything. I also did a physical clean out at that point. Then I scanned all the family photos as a backup. End game was everything everyone in my family ever did, or found value in, could be crammed in 200Gb of iCloud with 40Gb left over. Apple got to handle the music too. So that's how it rolls. I have no infrastructure other than a laptop, router and offline backup drive now, no huge energy dependency (my energy usage is stupid low) and my domain sits on AWS/CloudFront and Apple iCloud+. There's a dependency in one form or another so I'll pick the one that makes my life easier. Feeling liberated for me is not having the weight of this on my shoulders personally and not leaving that weight on my kids shoulders one day to pick through and deal with. I've been through too many dead people's stuff to want to do that to someone else now. If I want to learn something, I'll do a formal higher education thing, because I have the time to do it now! Edit: notably there was an advantage here at two points. Firstly my internet connection was down for 2 days when someone cut the cable. I did not lose any services because I could 4G tether. And secondly I moved house and had several months of hell trying to get an internet connection sorted out. Again, 4G was fine. I was pulling 100 gig a month over that 4G working from home and there was no noticeable material difference for me.

Helmut10001 3y ago
I know what you mean. I cannot really comment (I have a sick parent, now, too, unfortunately). Just one answer to this: > One of the worst sub-parts was the question from the kids: I want this music and then going to get it and deal with it and then distribute it to everyone. This would take hours a month to manage. There are million ways to set this up, I know. This is how I did it: People have their "music" folder that is synced to the Nextcloud Server. This folder is then bind-mount (read-only) to the Funkwhale-Docker inside an LXC container. On file updates, Funkwhale scans files and add any new music to people's libraries, so they can immediately listen to their new music. There is no human intervention required, zero admin work (beyond the initial setup). I followed this design principle throughout all my services and it is pretty much "if I have no time: leave it running and it will run 12month + without requiring work". I am at a stage now where this really _safes_ me time. All the document organization, paperless office etc. free up my spare time so I can play with my kid, help my parents etc. I simply lost all trust to cloud providers when Amazon once said I could backup my photos for free (5TB). The upload took one month. 12 months later, they said they would deprecate the service. I had to pull everything again. Never again.
- baz00 3y ago
  Sorry to hear about the sick parent. Regarding the music, mostly obtaining it in the first place is where the issues appear. Either it's difficult to get it (buy / warez / rip) and I have people with little to no technical ability and interest using it. Ergo Apple Music worked nicely. Wait until it all breaks and you spend all night up because the kids are complaining that they can't get to their music (been there). Can point at Apple now and say it's their fault ;-) As for trusting the cloud, you don't have to. Just have an exit plan. For me it's a backup drive and Spotify should apple go to shit.

by baz00 3y ago

Helmut10001 3y ago

I know what you mean. I cannot really comment (I have a sick parent, now, too, unfortunately). Just one answer to this: > One of the worst sub-parts was the question from the kids: I want this music and then going to get it and deal with it and then distribute it to everyone. This would take hours a month to manage. There are million ways to set this up, I know. This is how I did it: People have their "music" folder that is synced to the Nextcloud Server. This folder is then bind-mount (read-only) to the Funkwhale-Docker inside an LXC container. On file updates, Funkwhale scans files and add any new music to people's libraries, so they can immediately listen to their new music. There is no human intervention required, zero admin work (beyond the initial setup). I followed this design principle throughout all my services and it is pretty much "if I have no time: leave it running and it will run 12month + without requiring work". I am at a stage now where this really _safes_ me time. All the document organization, paperless office etc. free up my spare time so I can play with my kid, help my parents etc. I simply lost all trust to cloud providers when Amazon once said I could backup my photos for free (5TB). The upload took one month. 12 months later, they said they would deprecate the service. I had to pull everything again. Never again.

baz00 3y ago
Sorry to hear about the sick parent. Regarding the music, mostly obtaining it in the first place is where the issues appear. Either it's difficult to get it (buy / warez / rip) and I have people with little to no technical ability and interest using it. Ergo Apple Music worked nicely. Wait until it all breaks and you spend all night up because the kids are complaining that they can't get to their music (been there). Can point at Apple now and say it's their fault ;-) As for trusting the cloud, you don't have to. Just have an exit plan. For me it's a backup drive and Spotify should apple go to shit.