So I had questions on practicing restore! I wanted to start by just making sure I had something, but how does one validate, short of having a duplicate hardware setup to restore to?

Some of this is a bit extreme but a lot of it is capabilities I’ll be slowly building up. Read only backups is a fantastic point. I am indeed working at offsite backups. I have a separate drive for all the “untimely exit” stuff, and, most importantly, a physical printed folder in a fireproof safe. I have had/have some health issues that make it relevant. I strongly encourage practicality of air-tight security there. A plain text with accounts and passwords is a bad idea, but plain text naming where accounts are is reasonable. Yes, there’s always social engineering, but the people at those firms should be looking for proper legal documentation from the executor of the estate, and 98% of people are more likely to have a loved one who is cleaning things up than have someone stealing their identity. There is so much to handle when someone passes, any impediment makes it more likely someone just brute forces things.

Re: Scrubbing “impolite” data. I lost someone last fall who was a data nut (tons of personal and professional videos and photos). We joked about finding their porn stash, but mostly we got drunk clicked around, and laughed at them flubbing a take at a work video, I cried a bit at a motorcycle maintenance list they never got to, that kind of thing. End of life is messy and gross. If it doesn’t carry jail time I can promise you no one will care whats on the computer after cleaning the endless bodily fluids out of the bed and carpet.

I may pattern the backups of some drives, but there’s no way I’m going to have enough space to do that for 20+ TB of media. I like my media archive, I’ve spent a long time building it, but having the main drive, the local backup in a RAID, and an offsite is probably where that will end. The offsite will probably be a monthly one so that should help.

On the other hand, I am working on cool genealogy project through gramps, which is intended to be a “forever archive” kind of thing. That I may pattern as the data would be incredibly difficult to replace and there’s an increased chance of non-malicious issues given I’ll be opening it up to extended family of varying technical expertise. THAT I may pattern more extensively the way you suggest.

This is really helpful thank you! I think it’s samba share? Whatever Unraid has just baked in and calls “shares”.

Googling rsync that looks like it’ll work, and faster is better!

While I do want true backups of a few drives (as in: if a drive fails, restore the backup to a new drive, physically swap it out, and you’re good to go), the majority of the data I’m just looking to have it “backed up” (as in: all of the files are present in more than one location). The majority of the data is ~18TB of media for my plex server. My unraid is: 1x 2TB, 1x 10TB, 1x20TB and 1x20TB(parity). It sounds like Rsync-ing the 20TB drive with my plex media and the 20TB unraid disk would get me what I need?

Thanks for the pointers, getting a few things to google is incredibly helpful.

Lmfao, that’s what I mean, it makes way more sense to plan for the scenarios where you won’t be forced to, you know, resort to canibalism.

I’m a big fan of just augmenting your floating stock at home. I make a point of buying a few extra cans every-time I grocery shop, a few extra boxes of pasta etc. I focus on things I may actually cook with so I’m rotating stock. Diced tomatoes, canned beans, those tomatoes with green chilies in them. I’ve got some canned meat that I almost never cook with (a just in-case thing), it gets rotated through making dip during football season, but it’s there if I need it. I’ve also got textured vegetable protein (which is more for camping/a vegetarian I dated and tried to learn to cook for). Again, it’s a luxury for some folks (both for budget and space reasons).

But that was my point. This may not be you but it was surprising to me in early covid how many people just didn’t keep food around. Also spices, like it’s great to have rice and beans, but you’ll be a lot happier if you make sure you’ve got chili powder, hot sauce, soy sauce, etc.

Sure there are “grab and go” scenarios, but it is far more likley someone might need to put together some meals in a less than ideal situation. Being able to do, say, mac and cheese with some shredded canned chicken and hot sauce with a side of green beans goes a long way to keeping spirits up.

I didn’t grow up super rural, but it’s just the way my house was. One reason was the weather, the other was my mom was amazing at stretching a dollar. She’d buy when there was a great sale, and we’d have 4-5x of whatever the item was downstairs. So you’d wind up eating Christmas themed breakfast cereal until like May, but it also meant there was just a bunch of reserves.

As someone who is generally on the more prepared side, the use case for most stuff falls far short of “doomsday”. There is a ton to be said about things that are just generally useful in adverse situations. I’ve lived through a dozen or so storms that took out power for a few days (longest I think was 2 weeks). It’s usually not a complete blackout everywhere.

Point being: I can see it being useful to have a bunch of info in something easily portable to say, double check breaker wiring helping your friend fix some stuff after the storm. Look up the emergency AM/CB/NOAA radio freqs. I have a lot of the resources on this thing on a server, but that’s not mobile and would eat a lot of power just booting up. To package it nicely in a form factor like this would probably run me just about $189.

But the overall point is I think this falls on the extreme end of practical preparedness but I can absolutely see the use. Honestly the most practical thing on there are the books. Again, usually if a community gets hit bad you wind up with people that have power having a bunch of people stay over. Being able to allow multiple people stuff to read would help kill time.

All of that being said, its a distant second to the critical items that, again, have a huge range of uses: A solid first aide kit, 2 weeks of food (even if it’s not awesome). I realize that’s a luxury for a lot of people, but money is much better spent there first.

Strayed off topic a bit, but it’s because while I don’t think it makes a lot of sense to plan for SHTF scenarios, I do think we’re going to see a general decay (but not elimination) of public services/utilities and an increasingly pissy climate. I think it’s important for people to not fall into the bunker-prepper fantasy OR write off being more prepared than they’re accustomed to.

I can only hope, meet me at the corner of hollis and morris.

edit: seriously, from someone from a border town, we stand on guard for thee.

I can’t stop laughing, it’s like every inhibition has died.

THANK YOU. I know I can scroll through it, but I get tired of waiting.