Looks like the bulletin board along a busted rec center hallway. I can smell the flip-flop mildew from the locker room, lookin' at that shit.

Or

He paid $12 million to a spare-room scrapbooker for this.

If your rPi can't boot from an SSD, next time you upgrade, look at setting up an SD card that boots the rPi and then mounts an external SSD as the / partition.

It'd be a hack, but then all your configuration will be on the SSD, and you can keep a spare boot SD card. I would be surprised if the boot-only SD card needs more than 8GB.

HAOS is the best supported way to run Home Assistant - consider running it in a VM instead of HA in docker containers.

I ran HA in docker for years but eventually got tired of not being on the golden path where everything gets tested more thoroughly.

#homeassistant @homeassistant

@unixorn @homeassistant

Thank you for that input, I will investigate and evaluate if my Docker choice might not be the best.

I assume I could run HAOS on the same machine but under virtualBox? (as this is my Linux Mint all in one server)

Funny, I was thinking yesterday that data back up and restore should be taught in school; along the lines that it doesn't matter if it's a big cloud provider or a self host, or a physical piece of paper.

First you have to think about what you have and then think about how much it matters if you lose it, then how you will protect it.

i do need to get better at that. I self host loads of stuff, but my backup are within the same device (different hard disk though).

But it is such a burden to create a secure backup in a different location..

Before we had "the cloud", everyone was "self-hosting"; or rather, you'd run your programs locally, with your data saved locally, and you either had backups or you lost everything when your hard drive died.

The cloud is an improvement in that respect, but I still feel like 3rd party backups are something that should either be basic computer literacy, or even better part of any package (computer, OS, SaaS) you buy.

The only issue with self-hosting is that we haven't taught people how to go about it. It's abundantly clear that we need to remedy this.

I agree that resiliency and flexibility, backups, security, and visibility are all critical and all interwoven. Let's teach people how to do it and break them free from the shackles of surveillance capitalism as much as we can.

respect 3-2-1 and the principle that if you have no tested restore you have no backups.

3 copies
2 different medium
1 offsite location

do you have any such guide, or guides, in your bookmarks? I find it's hard to enter that whole space if you don't know what the previous 20y of tech change were, and witnessed them all first hand.

I can absolutely understand why newbies reach for ChatGPT summaries there.

I like proxmox a lot. Once the host is setup you have a really stable system that should last forever until hardware breaks. proxmox includes automatic backups via cron and easy restore of containers and other backups. Snapshots function before you do something.

I have attached a NAS for backups and that is working fine for years now. So. Yes. Test your backups is an important step!

It is a battle I fight on a daily basis.

We provide secure managed hosting for small businesses, and the number of times I get to explain "what's wrong with the $5 VPS my nephew runs our business on?"...

( more often then not, these nephews don't fall in the experienced self-hoster category, and don't even understand the risks of directly internet connected servers )

I do wish there were more utilities with a GUI that were just reasonably secure out of the box.

I used to have a bit of software that let you do an encrypted backup to an external hard drive then take that hard drive to a friend's house and have the software keep it updated over the internet. Then that company went all in on their own cloud service and I don't think you can use your own hardware anymore.