Dream PC Setup

stop ruining my fun :stuck_out_tongue:

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LOL:sweat_smile::laughing::laughing::joy::sweat_smile:

I’ve been toying with upping my RAID’ed drives as I could do with more space. Was looking at going either 4 or 6 4TB drives in RAID 10. However I’m thinking I may just go down the cloud backup route and buy Google drive space. That way I don’t need to worry about backups or redundancy. It is scalable and accessible anywhere without me relying on home internet being good.

It’s gonna be a shift in working practices for me! :grin:

@Arwen With cloud storage One plus is you don’t have to worry about hard drive failures, I have experienced a handful of those over the years. Makes me worry about my 10TB hard drive, but fingers crossed it doesn’t ever die on me

Exactly. That’s why I implement RAID that can survive at least one disk failure on my storage. Lost too much stuff over the years due to HDD failures :frowning:

Cloud is slow.

You have different causes of loss of data, one is physical via hardware failure other is logical via error such as application or human error.

Raid helps in certain types of physical failure. SSD are more reliable

If you’re concerned then use rsync to another system at home so anything large you can copy back. To allow for house scale loss then copy to cloud, or put another server in another house.

Servers can be just a Raspberry pi with a big hard drive.

After the initial bulk upload then speed doesn’t really worry me. Current photos/videos that I will be working on will be local. Cloud will be used for more archive/occasional off site access. I thought about a home NAS/Server set up as well. But that’s what I do at work and I can’t really be bothered to set it up and maintain it for myself :joy_cat:

@Arwen my 10TB hard drive is designed for a NAS system. I too wouldn’t mind having one but having to maintain it is a bit much for home use. Now whenever me and my family move and we have the space I will set one up for everyone to use as then it’s more of a convenience than a necessity

My work laptop uses rsync to the NAS in my home, the NAS in a family member’s home in another country. my phone and my tablet which has ssh running. I compiled truecrypt for ARM so have a portable encrypted filesystem. In total backup to 9 locations. Had a PC since 1995 never lost anything. My backup script is 59 lines long, which reminds me I got a new tablet need to update my script to backup to it.

Last night I updated crontab to download BBC News automatically and 2 nights earlier got Linux on my Android tablet to run PERL and was battling making ffmpeg, but it also can now run my scripts.

:~ $ crontab -l
0 15-20 * * * getnews 1>/tmp/getnews.txt 2>&1
nigel@raspberrypi:~ $ cat getnews
#!/bin/sh
if [ $(pgrep -c getnews) -gt "1" ]
then
        echo getnews already running
       exit
fi
gi --refresh --type=tv >/dev/null 2>&1
gi --tvmode=worse --get $(gi "Newsnight" | grep `date | awk '{print $2}'` | cut -d: -f1)
gi --tvmode=worse --get $(gi "News at Ten" | grep `date | awk '{print $2}'` | cut -d: -f1)

Cloud is good for tertiary backups.

Oops. Geek.

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Do you like my “datacenter” ?

Two big boxes on left is a big APC UPS it runs the stuff here for about 16 hours, long enough for your typical winter storm power outage we get., then local cable modem, the laptop is a half-broken one I use as a server to run a Windows VM, then I have an old phone I use tethered to my smartwatch so I can go al fresco just with no phone, and a raspberry Pi and a powered USB hub with a 1TB harddrive which is basically my NAS. I do media recoding on the “server” laptop has its got the CPU power about 40x faster the Raspberry Pi. Wifi router is up high and UPS powered. At the back is a VOIP router, I run virtual phone numbers so folks can phone me for free and the phone in the house rings.

Low down in garage to keep it cooler and held off floor in event of flood from the utilities nearby.

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I could do something like that, but as I said above. It’s what I do for my job. I like to simply switch off when I get home :smiley:

Very cool, but needs cable management

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Cool.

I ordered a new Raspberry Pi equivalent as mine is old and takes forever for certain tasks.

On the topic of “dream PC setup” I am the opposite, I like portable and lightweight and not being tied to a specific physical place like with a Tower setup. The device in my hand I like it to be able to run any application from anywhere.

This is where Anker has its role with keeping me unplugged for longer.

To that end I tend to keep the data heavy and cpu heavy tasks on “servers” (the logical and physical meaning) and consume them from clients. My client devices are Android phone, Android tablet and Chromebook tablet, these last typically of the order of 6-8 hours of use which covers a typical day but to stretch that longer is where Anker comes in.

The server side Raspberry Pi stores my “state” - my files - as it is very low power and can run for longer off the UPS. It though does not have much cpu performance (but its replacement will) so I use an x86 “server” of an old laptop which is faster. Between those two servers I am able to run any application need in the hand-held device or remotely.

For remote Windows applications I do:

  • (assuming I’m away from home)
  • SSH using the Android “Connectbot” app to initial an encrypted connection, I connect to a dyndns IP address with my home router updating the IP as my Cable modem IP changes. The router forwards incoming SSH port to the Raspberry Pi which then forwards to the x86 server.
  • Through the SSH client I use port forwarding to forward the x86 server (the old laptop) port for its RDP
  • Then on the Android device use a RDP client and then I can control Windows applications from my handheld device.
  • Then I have access over an encrypted connection to Windows applications
  • The x86 server is running linux, Virtualbox and a Windows VM and the VM’s console is what is the forwarding connects to.

The Raspberry Pi also does my media downloading, mostly BBC and writes to the 1TB harddrive connected, from that I can copy to my handheld device or stream over Wifi. I typically have 30-60GB of local media on my handheld device so when offline I have lots to watch.

The “Cloud” term is overused, what i described is sometimes called “home cloud” and is just a rename of running a server at home, the Cloud is where you use say Google Drive or MS OneDrive and cloud apps. The Chromebook is using Google’s web-based browser client apps and stores data in the Google Drive so from any Chrome browser you have your common applications. MS do something similar (Office365).

SSH and Rsync are two tools which go together and I use often. Rsync sends changed files and can transport over SSH so you have file replication encrypted. The target can run its own encryption locally so you have encryption at flight and at rest.

When I travel on business I much prefer to take an Android tablet as they are physically smaller and optionally have keyboards and most apps are local native, the few which are not I can run on either of the two “servers” for the brief time required. This means I can travel with just a Powerport and a Powercore and live out of very little. The longest I have done this moving light is 2 months.

So the opposite.

In the past I also had a PC, I also hand built my PCs from parts, and yes it was cheaper. I didn’t use liquid cooling but often a big heatsink with fan blowing noisily.

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Completely get the portability aspect. I value small, light and long life for my work laptop. If I need to do any “heavy lifting” I spin up a VM to the spec I need on our main infrastructure.

At home, I don’t even have a tablet. I do have a laptop (a Acer 11" i3 with soon to be 12GB of ram.) but it is hardly used for real things. I tend to use it more as a lab environment for things I am learning. I do everything on my phone pretty much.

My PC at home is a tower, primary because I am a gamer. And laptops suck for gaming :stuck_out_tongue: