• 1 Post
  • 47 Comments
Joined 8 months ago
cake
Cake day: February 25th, 2024

help-circle




  • Switched my parents from an iMac to an old Dell Optiplex running Elementary OS. It worked pretty well but there were some glitches with Pantheon DE and OS version upgrades required a reinstall, so I switched them to Fedora after a couple years. It’s easier for me to support because I run Fedora on my laptop. Everyone’s happy now. There is always some amount of tech support to do but lately it has been very low. I even helped my dad upgrade the RAM over the phone once, that was fun.



  • I use Borg Backup, automated with a bash script that Borg provides. A cron job runs the script at the desired frequency. I keep backups on different computers, ideally I would recommend one copy in the cloud and one copy on a local machine. Borg compresses and encrypts its backups.

    Edit: I migrated a server once using the backups from this system and it worked great.










  • There’s a lot to address here as you’re talking about hardware and possibly multiple levels of software.

    Yes, you can do this with raspberry pi or any SBC or mini PC. Even an old desktop PC if space isn’t an issue.

    In terms of photo management software, I really like Photoprism. Immich seems to be popular as well.

    In order to get your photos synced to multiple computers over the internet (a good idea for resilience), you could look at syncthing. Alternatively, you could have one central server and one or two backups in different locations using borg backup or similar. In my experience, backups are easier to manage and make it easier to recover from data loss than replicating the current state of your data in multiple places. You can do both, though.

    It’s a very worthwhile project, but may be pretty difficult unless you are already comfortable with server technology or are enthusiastic about learning.




  • Get a Pixel 7 or newer and put Graphene OS on it. Pixels are excellent phones and have good support for custom ROMs. The Pixel 6 has a lot of weird issues that the others don’t have, so avoid it. Graphene is the best ROM for privacy AND security, and it is also relatively user-friendly.

    Or, if you want an older phone, try a Pixel 3, 4 or 5. They are good phones with an older design style that may appeal to you.

    /e/OS (also known as Murena) is also a good ROM for privacy, and supports a broader range of devices.