
Ask HN: How to make a digital black box? - mothsonasloth
I&#x27;ve been researching how to make a black box of my digital life.<p>Currently these are the situations I want to engineer for (with scripts &#x2F; software tools)<p>* Suspension of my Google account (emails&#x2F;photos&#x2F; contacts)
* Suspension of my Flickr (photos) - not really an issue as I have backups of photos
* Suspension of dropbox account
* Backup of music (MP3s)
* Backup of personal files
* Phone gets stolen or destroyed<p>I have a HTPC (home theatre pc) with Ubuntu Server 18.04 running and sufficient storage.<p>I want to have it running at home in a secure location (well ventilated).<p>My first phase I am currently doing, is figuring out how to make it connectable outside ADSL router. How can I communicate with it from a non fixed IP address?<p>Second phase is synchronising with all trusted devices using Nextcloud self hosted server.<p>Third phase is to write a script to check for my emails from Gmail or perhaps just use an email client like Thunderbird?<p>Fourth phase is checking for sending notifications or log events e.g. &quot;Synchronised as of 9:04GMT.&quot;, &quot;Low storage.&quot;, &quot;96 Duplicate photos removed&quot;<p>Any suggestions or instructions?
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CyberFonic
I'm sure there will be many useful suggestions. Mine are limited to some
specific issues:

Power: strongly recommend that you install an intelligent UPS. That is one
that can shutdown the server on command once the battery power is below a set
threshold.

Non-fixed IP address: the simple solution is to configure one of the many
dynamic DNS services. Most firewall/routers have support for this feature.

Internet facing server: Although you can use DDNS, I personally would rather
have a well firewalled server doing suitable pull requests.

Gmail: you can configure either LDAP or POP3 and periodically copy down all
your emails. POP3 is a bit simpler to set up, whilst LDAP has more features.
You could use Thunderbird or simply a suitably configured SMTP daemon.

Duplicate files: the 'fdupes' utility can be very useful. However, I recommend
doing a backup before you run it. There are scenarios when a malformed command
can delete more than you had intended.

Backups: no matter how much storage you have on your HTPC it would be prudent
to configure scheduled backups to external hard-drives which then you store
securely, preferably with at at least one set at another location.

