I agree with everything except the offsite, offline, external drive.

In my experience, cold drives fail more often than live drives, and you get no warning when this happens.

Drives weren’t engineered to be offline but to be powered on continuously. Things like lubricants in the spindle, but especially the read heads pivot were designed around this. How anybody us have heard the click of death - that’s the read head having issues moving.

Plus external drives have heat dissipation problems. They’re good for short, intermittent reads, but when initially copying data to them they can get quite hot. I regularly recover and rebuild drives for family and friends and have registered these things at 120° F+, so I keep an old case fan on them during recovery.

My current backup approach uses Syncthing, but only to replicate all data to a single point, which is then backed up properly.

All mobile devices sync to home, that box is the authoritative data source for everything: mobile devices, user data, media files, etc.

It replicates to two other local data stores (this for quick recovery should a drive/device fail) and is backed up to a cloud service (should I have a catastrophic event).

Its not a perfect 3-2-1 setup, but addresses my risks well enough.

Someone down-voted but I agree, and this from actual experience doing stuff similar to OP.

Flexibility, compatibility, and power consumption are significant considerations for a self-hoster.

I’ve run ST with Pi, and while Pi is great, it’s non-standard so doesn’t have the benefit (yet) of ubiquity. While it’s low power consumption is fantastic, mini PC’s and even SFF (Small-Form-Factor) desktops are in the same range for similar costs (in the used market) while providing orders of magnitude more performance per watt and much more hardware compatibility.

A Pi 5 today is in the $120 range - for a device that on it’s own will idle at about 4 watts, with peak draw at 15w. This without any storage yet, and no case.

A mini PC will idle about the same - but can house a large, standard drive so be a much better package for OP’s intended use-case, and cost less on the used market.

I’d maybe add an online backup for the device you’ve chosen to be the authoritative data source to achieve close to a 3-2-1.

Oh, yea, very low data rate.

Great example of a use-case.

So an internet with voluntary transit

Neat idea to use it for this

Fortunately its super easy to get into XMPP, especially with apps like Cheogram as they offer easy account creation.

Wow, Jellyfin on the Tizen store is huge.

I’ve been running it on my Samsung - getting it installed (“side loaded”, uggh, hate that term) isn’t for the faint-hearted. Hell, I had to document it with photos of the TV to ensure I could do it again.

Not that I like installing apps from Samsung’s app store, I really don’t want to use any of the smart features on the TV, it was just the easiest path forward at the moment.

Exactly, bandwidth doesn’t degrade over distance, so why would the uplibk bandwidth be the issue for Asia when its fine for Europe.

I use Syncthing and Resilio Sync for this stuff.

Both of them sync according to rules you define.

I sync my mobile devices to home this way, and access the folders on the server via SMB shares (which are unrelated to ST or Resilio).

No web interface required, as you just use whatever network sharing you want at home.

What “extra steps” are you running into with SyncThing? Its really flexible (especially Syncthing-Fork for Android). Maybe it or Resilio can be configured to do what you need.

For example, I use the Selective Sync feature in Resilio so that I can access any file at home whenever I want without using a VPN.

Seen what?

Second this.

And I’ll add DietPi is great, easy to run wherever you want. I run it in its own VM on my ESXi box.

I’d figure out why RDP stopped working. Sounds like something changed.

Anything else could be stymied by the same things that blocked RDP - firewall change, etc.

I’ve used other tools since before RDP even existed as Citrix Remote Desktop in the 90’s… Frankly for LAN only there’s little reason to consider anything else with Windows boxes unless you want remote management features like services, shares, etc. Even then I often just use RDP because it just works.

Edit: ah, I had it backwards, your server is Linux and your laptop is Windows.

I’d use VNC, or just ssh for most stuff.

It’s not as good as the original, but again, you can’t tell the difference on a 65" TV, especially with old TV shows that are 4:3

There’s so many ways to skin this cat, you may want to start with identifying the most crucial single failure point that concerns you.

Is it the router? Best you can really do is have good hardware and make sure it and your modem are on a UPS.

If it’s an ISP-provided modem, some enable remote management via a phone app, which can be done from anywhere by signing in to your ISP account.

This is merely ROI, it doesn’t capture things like watching what you want.

I started from needing a server for mobile devices to sync to, music, general file storage, and some virtual machines for testing stuff.

That put me at about 1TB. I already had a bunch of DVDs that I wanted to watch more conveniently, so I just upped the storage and started converting my own stuff.

So my setup isn’t just for media/replacing subscriptions - that a knock on effect.

Still this is a nice calculator for me to better visualize what things actually cost.

Well it’s a pretty good start (and I do agree with you on using the appropriate terminology). I’ve had to look at it differently and use it with the ideas in my head being misrepresented on screen. Still the idea is great.

Sounds like you’d be a great co-conspirator for OP to really make this project exceptional.

You can choose language top right

Curious, have you tested rebuilding using this approach?

It makes sense to me, if the compose files are up-to-date, it should just work.

I’d only be concerned about ensuring I capture changes made to the container that happened after initial build.

The company owns legal liability for anything you so on their hardware.

The end.

This is what I was trying to find for op. Well done!