In 2011 I wrote up the cron entry that pushed rdiff-backup
from my laptop. Here’s what runs in its place.
TrueNAS
A TrueNAS holds about 2.5 TiB of my household’s data on a 10-TiB
pool. The biggest dataset is takeout, 1.3 TiB built up from a
Google Takeout that runs every two months. When a new generation
lands in Drive, a Cloud Sync job pulls it out and prunes it on the
box. I check the result and bin the Drive copy, so the daily 02:00
sync tends to have nothing left to do. After that come media (a
terabyte of video and music), the smaller plex and scans
datasets, and a couple of utility datasets I leave alone.
Cloud Sync runs six tasks on the box, and the Takeout flow above is
one of them. The other five fall into two shapes. Two are sync
tasks, where the NAS leads and Drive keeps a copy in step: media
every six hours, plex every two. Three are move tasks, taking a
file made at one end and sending it where it will live for good.
scans goes from the NAS into Drive every fifteen minutes. Xbox
screenshots and Game DVR clips come from OneDrive into the NAS on
the same clock. The source is emptied once the file lands.
The sync tasks hedge against losing the NAS. The move tasks aren’t backup at all. They’re routing, and the files they route end up somewhere that does get backed up.
Two gaps I know about. Alloy’s configuration belongs in Cloud Sync next to Plex, and it isn’t there yet. Nothing tells me when a Cloud Sync task fails, either—not my weekly Grafana Cloud triage, not TrueNAS’s email alerts. I find out late, when something I expected to be there isn’t.
Home Assistant
Home Assistant runs as HAOS on a mini PC, a whole box given over to one service, which is bulky but uncomplicated. Nabu Casa does the backups: one a day, plus one before every update. Where they go, how they get there, and how long they’re kept all come with the plan, and their docs cover the rest.
Chromebook
To get the Chromebook back I sign into a Google account. The one exception is the Linux dev environment, where anything I edit locally lives. I used to dump it into Google Drive once a month, and I’ve let that slip on purpose while I move my Linux setup into chezmoi under alunduil-chezmoi. A clean run from chezmoi should restore the environment from scratch. Proving that it does is on the list.
My phone and an Onyx Boox Tab Ultra C both sign in to the same Google account. None of the devices lock me in. The account does. The hardware stays replaceable. The substrate underneath doesn’t.
Cloud-first by choice, because doing it any other way would cost more time than I want to spend. The disaster plan: if a cloud vendor stops working, what I’d rebuild from, in what order, and from which local copy. I haven’t tested it.
