Syncthing could be used to replicate a directory somewhere, but that doesn’t address backing up the phone itself (apps, settings, SMS messages, etc.). Only option I’m aware of is iCloud. You can connect the phone directly to iTunes on a computer and back it up that way, but that only works with a hardwired USB connection and can’t be automated, so it’s a non-starter for a regular backup system. Android probably has more options, I’m referring to iOS specifically here though.

Agreed, but most people don’t backup at all. Then complain very loudly when they lose everything and blame everyone else other than themselves. Saw it daily fixing people’s phones.

I’d love to back up my phone locally, if there was an option, but AFAIK there isn’t, so I’m stuck. This is a problem with companies forcing you into their cloud ecosystem and removing your ability to bypass it and control things yourself. It’s only getting worse.

How about XPipe?

https://xpipe.io/

It can even auto-configure itself by parsing out your ~/.ssh/config so you can keep everything defined there for easy CLI access but also use the GUI when desired.

Just FYI - you’re going to spend far, FAR more time and effort reading release notes and manually upgrading containers than you will letting them run :latest and auto-update and fixing the occasional thing when it breaks. Like, it’s not even remotely close.

Pinning major versions for certain containers that need specific versions makes sense, or containers that regularly have breaking changes that require you to take steps to upgrade, or absolute mission-critical services that can’t handle a little downtime with a failed update a couple times a decade, but for everything else it’s a waste of time.

How about Dawarich?

https://github.com/Freika/dawarich

I haven’t used it myself, but I have it in the backlog of things to try out

I had something almost identical to this happen to me on Friday. Last year our company moved to a super locked down version of Teams, to the point where I couldn’t even open images that people put in the chat because of security issues, instead the image they posted would be replaced with an error image saying that I wasn’t allowed to open images, blah blah blah. That problem was resolved a long time ago though.

On Friday I was trying to send an image of some data processing to a colleague, and every time I put it in Teams, it would show up as that stupid error message. I spent a solid hour trying to figure out why that problem was back, was my computer not authenticating with MS properly, etc. Turns out my file browser was sorting by time order instead of reverse time order, and the screenshot at the top of the list from May 2 2024, was a screenshot of the error message that I used to send to IT when they were investigating the problem.

I’ve never understood this. You guys know you can have multiple Firefox windows, right? What’s the point of tab groups when you can just group related tabs in a different window? Between multiple workspaces, multiple monitors, and multiple browser windows, I never feel the need to have more than 5-10 tabs open on any one of them at a time. More than that and I’m clearly doing something wrong and need to clean up anyway.

No names? On what? People just go around saying “no names”?

It says “no mames”. I’m not sure what on earth that means, but I suspect it isn’t a typo (writeo?)

I self-host Bitwarden, hidden behind my firewall and only accessible through a VPN. It’s perfect for me. If you’re going to expose your password manager to the internet, you might as well just use the official cloud version IMO since they’ll likely be better at monitoring logs than you will. But if you hide it behind a VPN, self-hosting can add an additional layer of security that you don’t get with the official cloud-hosted version.

Downtime isn’t an issue as clients will just cache the database. Unless your server goes down for days at a time you’ll never even notice, and even then it’ll only be an issue if you try to create or modify an entry while the server is down. Just make sure you make and maintain good backups. Every night I stop and rsync all containers (including Bitwarden) to a daily incremental backup server, as well as making nightly snapshots of the VM it lives in. I also periodically make encrypted exports of my Bitwarden vault which are synced to all devices - those are useful because they can be natively imported into KeePassXC, allowing you to access your password vault from any machine even if your entire infrastructure goes down. Note that even if you go with the cloud-hosted version, you should still be making these encrypted exports to protect against vault corruption, deletion, etc.

2-4G for swap (more if you want to hibernate), the rest for /. Only add a boot/EFI partition if needed.

Over-partitioning is a newbie mistake IMO, it usually causes way more problems than it solves.

Main reason is that if you don’t already have the right key, VPN doesn’t even respond, it’s just a black hole where all packets get dropped. SSH on the other hand will respond whether or not you have a password or a key, which lets the attacker know that there’s something there listening.

That’s not to say SSH is insecure, I think it’s fine to expose once you take some basic steps to lock it down, just answering the question.

Some people move the port to a nonstandard one, but that only helps with automated scanners not determined attackers.

While true, cleaning up your logs such that you can actually see a determined attacker rather than it just getting buried in the noise is still worthwhile.

Yes, by staying privately funded and not throwing everything away chasing quarterly profits

Same, I don’t let Docker manage volumes for anything. If I need it to be persistent I bind mount it to a subdirectory of the container itself. It makes backups so much easier as well since you can just stop all containers, backup everything in ~/docker or wherever you put all of your compose files and volumes, and then restart them all.

It also means you can go hog wild with docker system prune -af --volumes and there’s no risk of losing any of your data.

Mint is basically Ubuntu with all of Canonical’s BS removed. This definitely counts as Canonical BS, so I’d be surprised if it made its way into Mint.

As far as networking, from what I could see the only real change casaos was doing was mapping its dashboard to port 80, but not much more. Is there anything more I should be aware in general?

It depends on how you have things set up. If you’re just doing normal docker compose networking with port forwards then there shouldn’t be much to change, but if you’re doing anything more advanced like macvlan then you might have to set up taps on the host to be able to communicate with the container (not sure if CasaOS handles that automatically).

The nice thing about docker is all you need to do is backup your compose file, .env file, and mapped volumes, and you can easily restore on any other system. I don’t know much about CasaOS, but presumably you have the ability to stop your containers and access the filesystem to copy their config and mapped volumes elsewhere? If so this should be pretty easy. You might have some networking stuff to work out, but I suspect the rest should go smoothly and IMO would be a good move.

When self-hosting, the more you know about how things actually work, the easier it is to fix when something is acting up, and the easier it is to make known good backups and restore them.

Elon is really unpopular right now and “regular” republicans feel like he and DOGE are attacking them.

Only those who have been personally harmed. The rest of them, and that’s the vast majority, actually believe Elon is cleaning up the government and finding/eliminating corruption. I work with one, he’s convinced everything DOGE has found and cut is corruption/fraud, the kids who are rooting through the Treasury are geniuses capable of finding things that no other administration has been able to (or been willing to?) find, and ultimately the Government is going to run more efficiently and taxes can be lower for regular people when it’s all said and done. They’re too deep in the rabbit hole to see the light.

Best luck I’ve had with laptops has been Razer, actually. They’re gaming laptops, so a bit warm and loud and the battery life isn’t great, but they’re built like a brick, can be easily opened, all parts are easily replaceable/upgradeable, and since they generally use Intel everything, Linux compatibility is solid as well (except for RGB lighting and stuff, but with OpenRazer and Polychromatic even that usually works except for brand new models).

My last laptop was a Razer Blade 14 which ran great for like 6 years before I just got bored and decided I wanted to upgrade to a newer model with a better display. Over the 6 years I used it I upgraded the RAM, SSD, added a second SSD, upgraded the WiFi card, etc. It ran literally 24/7 during that entire time other than brief moments when I shut it down to throw in a backpack for travel, the only thing I had to replace for maintenance was the battery. I now have a Razer Blade 16 which has been great for the last year, zero issues, also running 24/7.

Before Razer I used Dell, Lenovo, HP, and Asus. None of them lasted more than 2-3 years before either the plastic crap holding it together fell apart, or the monitor, mouse, or keyboard failed, or I wanted/needed to upgrade something that was not user-replaceable (usually RAM or WiFi).

They didn’t provide an rsync example until later in the post, the comment about not supporting differential backups is in reference to using rsync itself, which is incorrect, because rsync does support differential backups.

I agree with you that not doing differential backups is a problem, I’m simply commenting that this is not a drawback of using rsync, it’s an implementation problem on the user’s part. It would be like somebody saying “I like my Rav4, it’s just problematic because I don’t go to the grocery store with it” and someone else saying “that’s a big drawback, the grocery store has a lot of important items and you need to be able to go to it”. While true, it’s based on a faulty premise, because of course a Rav4 can go to the grocery store like any other car, it’s a non-issue to begin with. OP just needs to fix their backup script to start doing differential backups.