A lot of people are talking about their backup storage solutions in here, but it's mostly about corporate cloud providers. I'm curious if anyone is going more rogue with their solution and using off-prem storage at a friend's house.
Which is to say, hardware is cheap, software is open, and privacy is very hard to come by. Thus I've been thinking I'd like to not use cloud providers and just keep a duplicate system at a friends, and then of course return the favor. This adds a lot of privacy and quite a bit of redundancy. With the rise of wireguard (and tailscale I suppose), keeping things connected and private has never been easier.
I know that leaning on social relationships is never a hot trend in tech circles but is anyone else considering doing this? Anyone done it? I've never seen it talked about around here.
My off-prem backups are in a Tailscale connected NAS at my parent's house. I'm in the process of talking a friend into having Tailscale configured to host more off-prem backups at his place as well. I'm moving out of iCloud for photo library management and into Immich. I really don't want to lose my photos and videos hence the off-prem backups. Tailscale has been a blessing for this kind of use case
I'm in the process of moving all my backups to Immich - honestly it's best in class software.
I'm able to set it up so that my SO and I can view all the pictures taken by the other (mostly cute photos of our dog and kid, but makes it easier to share them with others when we don't have to worry about what device they're on), have it set to auto-backup, and routed through my VPS so it's available effectively worldwide.
The only issue that I run into is a recent one, which is hard drive space - I've got it on a NAS/RAID setup with backups sent to another NAS at my parents' place, but it's an expensive drive replacement in current market conditions.
I can also recommend Ente. It is pretty polished. Go-based backend using Postgres DB, Flutter-based android version, React-based web frontend (electron for desktop).
Hardware was cheap a year ago. Whoever managed to build their boxes full of cheap RAM and HDDs, great, they did the right thing. It will be some time until such an opportunity presents itself again.
I do something like this! I’m based in NY but my dad’s in LA. I put together an rpi5 + 5xSATA hat with 3 10TB WD red drives using zraid1 (managed to pick these up over the holidays before prices started going up, $160 per drive!). 3D printed the case and got it running a diskless alpine image with tailscale and zrepl for ZFS snapshot replication. Just left it running in a corner at his place and told him not to touch it heh
Whole thing cost around $500. Before that I was paying ~$35 a month for a Google workspace with 5TB of drive space. At one point in the past it was “unlimited” space for $15 a month. Figure the whole thing will pay for itself in the next couple of years.
Actually just finished the initial replication of my 10TB pool. I ran into a gnarly situation where zrepl blew away the initial snapshot on the source pool just after it finished syncing, and I ended up having to patch in a new fake “matching” snapshot. I had claude write up a post here, if you’ll excuse the completely AI generated “blog post”, it came up with a pretty good solution https://gist.github.com/evanpurkhiser/7663b7cabf82e6483d2d29...
Yes, absolutely. I move between two sites, and also run some gear at my sibling's home, so I have the 3 separate sites thing sorted. ECC + RAID1 + borg at each site gives archival capability on top of standard backup.
Syncthing has the 'untrusted peer' feature, which I've only used once, accidentally, but I believe provides an elegant way of providing some disk for a friend while maintaining privacy of the content.
> I'm curious if anyone is going more rogue with their solution and using off-prem storage at a friend's house.
Have been doing this for 25 years.
If you have asymmetrical connections it's easiest to do the initial backup locally and then take your drive(s) to your friends house and then just sync/update.
I get 3-2-1 backups with no "big cloud" dependency using
- My Mac
- My NAS (RAID1) using Syncthing
- Incremental borg backups to rsync.net (geo-redundant plan) with a cron job.
Graphene supports the 6a, which unlocked goes for ~$100 on ebay. I imagine you can swing that as a lawyer to play around.
I'll also echo the ideas from everyone else here. You can just use it as a normal Android phone the way you do any other and there's still big benefits. There's also really big benefits in terms of carrier privacy that aren't often talked about, like vpn routing and hotspot usage.
Have any descriptions or analysis of what is considered "properly" on the cutting edge? I'm very curious. Only part of my profession is coding. But it would be nice to get insight into how people who really try to learn with these tools work.
I would say the first starting point is to run your agent somewhere you're comfortable with giving it mostly unconstrained permissions (e.g. --dangerously-skip-permissions for Claude COde), but more importantly, setting up sub-agents to hand off most work to.
A key factor to me in whether you're "doing it right" is whether you're sitting there watching the agent work because you need to intervene all the time, or whether you go do other stuff and review the code when the agent think it's done.
To achieve that, you need a setup with skills and sub-agents to 1) let the model work semi-autonomously from planning stage until commit, 2) get as much out of the main context as possible.
E.g. at one client, the Claude Code plugin I've written for them will pull an issue from Jira, ask for clarification if needed, then augment the ticket with implementation details, write a detailed TODO list. Once that's done, the TODO items will be fed to a separate implementation agent to do the work, one by one - this keeps the top level agent free to orchestrate, with little entering its context, and so can keep the agent working for hours without stopping.
Once it's ready to commit, it invokes a code-review agent. Once the code-review agent is satisifed (possibly involving re-work), it goes through a commit checklist, and offers to push.
None of these agents are rocket-science. They're short and simple, because the point isn't for them to have lots of separate context, but mostly to tell them the task and move the step out of the main agents context.
I've worked on a lot more advanced setups too, but to me, table stakes beyond minimising permissions is is to have key workflows laid out in a skill + delegate each step to a separate sub-agent.
> how people who really try to learn with these tools work
This setup is potentially effective sure, but you're not learning in the sense that GP meant.
For GP: Personally I've reached the conclusion that it's better for my career to use agents effectively and operate at this new level of abstraction, with final code review by me and then my team as normal.
> This setup is potentially effective sure, but you're not learning in the sense that GP meant.
Then GP didn't mean anything useful. I've learned how to build those setups. I learn to build by orchestrating groups of agents, and I get to spend far more of my time focusing on architecture, rather than minutiae that are increasingly irrelevant.
I think about this all the time through the lens of "authority" on a topic. When we yielded our gathering spaces online to major social sites (read, Zuck et al) we then gave the content all the authority of what it means to dialogue in those places. Which is to say... not much.
This has impacted journalism, music, science, and so much more. It would take an eternity to hash out my perspective but I think that there's value in realizing that. And I think there's value of creating content from the authority of a personal website with cache. I think music is a great place for this to take off, since you don't need institutional backing. You just need good words and a deep connection to the community. In that way, I hope people do write and create good content through their own mediums/sites. And I hope we all join in reading and sharing those sites.
I think that might be my favorite department/lab website I've ever come across. Really fun. Doesn't at all align with the contemporary design status quo and it shows just how good a rich website can be on a large screen. Big fan.
Uh.This has happened plenty. It's pretty well known that there's a lot of various abductions/disappearances of people the Chinese govt doesn't like. Including outright deaths in the streets:
This is so false I can't even begin to describe it. And I say this as someone who nearly daily wanders around National Forest near his house.
First, why would it hurt to codify land access in a clearer way. And second. There are continuous battles with private landowners of where and how to access the public lands that you claim mean we don't need traditional paths or easements. See the recent Wyoming corning crossing case.
There are some public lands within a 5 minute walk of my house that I cannot access because rich landowners have intentionally cordoned them off. They're beautiful areas that should remain public. Why should you be able to effectively buy public land by restricting access to it maliciously? Why shouldn't Americans take seriously access to our shared land resources?
I don't think we really disagree. We should have better laws preventing landowners from restricting access to public land, and we should have laws explicitly allowing things like corner-crossing. But these are mostly issues in areas of public land that border developed areas. Since the vast majority of public land in this country is freely accessible to everyone via public roads that can't be blocked by private landowners, there's never really been enough political will to do large-scale land access reform like they did in the UK.
Again, over 90% of UK land is private, and large land barons control the vast majority of that. We just don't have a similarly widespread issue with land access in the US.
Yeah same thing happens around here. A dude here bought some land which surrounded an old popular access road to Cleveland national forest (socal), and promptly put a gate up... For a while it was the only convenient way to drive into the mountains from riverside county. Alternative routes were either closed from fires, closed to vehicles, or located on the other side of the mountain range. Lots of Facebook drama between this guy and people in the area trying to access the national forest. He has a camera pointed at the gate and regularly posts altercations and threatens to shoot people.
I don't get why people do those sorts of things. If you own land your #1 enemy is the government. In that situation it behooves you to do things to endear yourself to the community, your neighbors, etc.
Related but annoying question. What are you all using for public lands access and land ownership? This is a similar problem where the paid/closed apps (OnX et al) have very good data but serious issues for obvious reasons.
Caltopo is great for this. They require a subscription to download (raster) maps but you can cache a bunch of tiles before you leave to get the gist. These days this is one of the very scarce use cases I don't use OSMand for.
I must be a bad researcher then because every paper I've written starts as a very vague "here are the overarching implications and important results". But the detailed order of results and the nuts and bolts of how to argue out the conclusions gets decided in drafting. Only the simplest of results I've had is essentially pre-written.
Sincere reply assuming sincere question, the implication is that they are statistically much more likely to live near interstates and highways. Since historically land owned by poor 'disadvantaged groups' has been easier for state and federal governments to get their hands on.
The sentence, while poorly written, isn't saying that "health impacts don't matter for 'non-disadvantaged people'". A reading that is disingenuous.
Which is to say, hardware is cheap, software is open, and privacy is very hard to come by. Thus I've been thinking I'd like to not use cloud providers and just keep a duplicate system at a friends, and then of course return the favor. This adds a lot of privacy and quite a bit of redundancy. With the rise of wireguard (and tailscale I suppose), keeping things connected and private has never been easier.
I know that leaning on social relationships is never a hot trend in tech circles but is anyone else considering doing this? Anyone done it? I've never seen it talked about around here.