Ok, so the backup situation for all of our TROM files. We have 4-6 million files and around 8TB of data. A struggle to find a proper way to back it up online. But I am perfecting it I think.

The server.

Millions of files, all around 1.5TB in size. With file versioning we get closer to 2TB. I used to grab them locally via SFTP with FreeFileSync but that took hours every day and TBs of data. No at all ideal. Now I am doing it with Borg. Finally managed to understand how it works. 2 servers, 2 repositories, 2TB of borgbase.com storage. The good thing with Borg is that you can have your own borgbase.com if you want, thanks to @YunoHost . But for now I choose to buy from them.

So Borg is great because it compresses and deduplicates all files and the Yunohost config is quite easy once you "get it". Now it should keep several versions of files and it is server to server. No more "I need my computer and a great internet connection to keep the servers backuped". The backups are fast and thanks to Vorta, their desktop tool, I can easily connect to these repos and mount them or extract any files I want, or delete some. As easy as that. I do not like the terminal, I feel blind when using it, but for Borg I will still have to use it to restore backups for example. And I can put up with that. Tested, seems easy.

So I use borgbase with 2TB of storage for all of the servers + my local system files, like config files and such, since Borg works great with tons of files that are not that big sized. From servers to Borg, from my computer to Borg. All seem to work really well thus far.

The files.

The rest of the files are around 6TB. That is TROM II documentary, VN stuff, and so forth. It seems that Mega is great for very large files. Probably Mega got stuck when I told it to backup tons of small files because now it seems to work well. So I backup the rest to Mega.

2TB of BorgBase + 8TB of Mega = 350 Euros a year. 50 Euros more than when I first planned for this and got donations for this purpose. It is fine. I'll add 50 more Euros for that. I am still testing this for a week or so before buying these for a full year. I want the backups to be seamless and "just work". Right now they seem so, but let's see. 1 week should settle this dispute :).

Backups are damn important so you should do them properly, regularly, and safely. The options I chose are encrypted end to end. And easy to setup it seems.

I want to go back to TROM II after this. Tomorrow I shall start. #tromlive

So most of the videos used for our books were hosted on vimeo. That is, short clips and such that we grab from the very unstable internet. We did that so they don't get deleted and vimeo, at that time, was the only option. We paid for a vimeo subscription. For the past 2-3 books we used archive.org. Too stupid to know that archive.org was such a great alternative before that...

Since there are hundreds if not thousands of such small videos across thousands of pages of books, I could not fix this issue even after finding out about archive.org, or better yet after having our own peertube instance. And it was on my to do list but I never did it.

Ok. So now Vimeo deleted my account because of 1 video where I recorded the screen showcasing how facebook fails to ban porn videos on their website. It was me scrolling through the fb newsfeed showcasing porn videos without playing them. Eventually I managed to talk to them and restore the account but they can delete it at any time. They have deleted that video...

Now I am grabbing all videos from vimeo with youtube-dl and idk...I'll have to add themto our peertube as unlisted then fix all books!? This seems like an insane amount of work so idk wtf to do...

For now is ok because the account was restored but I am walking on thin ice...

Damn these platforms....I knew very well why I always wanted to have my own such platforms. Fuck these fuckers with their stupid rules...

#tromlive

Trying Borg backups. @aaron kinda made me curious. MegaSync is still failing so it is unreliable. Borg is more complicated to backup and restore with it from my first impression. You need to generate these ssh keys and all that, and repositories, etc. :D . It is not as bad as it sounds, but definitely not install and run sort of thing. The great aspect is that I can backup my computer files + servers with it. Both. So far I am testing the computer via Vorta. Seems to work well. Compression and Deduplication made my first 240GB batch of files as low as 165GB. Now backing up some 2.5TB to test. Lots of videos for TROM 2.

The downside is that it is more expensive. Mega was 300 Euros for 16TB a year. Borg is 750 Euros for the same storage space. More than 3 times. But maybe with compression and deduplication I may only need 8TB, which is some 400 Euros a year. I need to test it.

All of them are tons more expensive than doing local backups but doing local backups means you are stuck in the same place, physically, since you need the drives and the internet connection. And I may not have those in the near future (1-2 years who knows). I may even end up with buying a Borg backup for 150$ a year only for the servers and try to use a cheaper Mega for other files...idk...let's see...

#tromlive

Trying to find a fix for the flatpaks nonsense of "not respecting the system's theme" thing, is difficult. It is a mess it seems. Unless there is a trick somewhere that can do it easily. I managed to make it so that GTK flatpak apps respect the theme, unless they use the awful libadwaita. But the rest I cannot. And even for the gtk ones is quite a hack... Is it worth it? We have flatpaks enabled by default in tromjaro so I'd like to see some consistency there, but then idk if it is worth to find a hacky solution to then be rendered invalid by whatever these people push into these "cool" packaging and design systems.

I am baffled as to why respecting the system's theme is not a must for any of these developers. How in the world you want me to function when I may have 10 apps that have 10 different styles, from buttons and the number of them, to the position of them, to dark/light mode, color schemes, fonts....are these people who come up with such systems even use computers much?

So yeah let's see if I can find a fix for the qt part of flatpaks or not....but maybe is not worth it. I enabled flatpaks for TROMjaro just in case you can't find some apps in manjaro's repos or AUR.

#tromlive