Permacomputing

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Computing to support life on Earth

Computing in the age of climate crisis is often wasteful and adds nothing useful to our real life communities. Here we try to find out how to change that.

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First principles and practical solutions regarding personal data storage (self.permacomputing)

submitted 7 months ago by tributarium to c/[email protected]

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Hi all, I'm really looking for some help. I need to create a reliable system of backing up and data storage. I'm not tech-savvy (will work on that when it's a priority in my life, which it definitely can't be right now) and I'm asking this community because it's forward-thinking and aligns with my values. There are things I have right now, on paper and digitally, that I want to be able to retrieve at least a decade from now (and we'll check in on how the situation changes and what's worth keeping or printing out etc then). Most of the stuff bouncing about in my brain is the conventional advice:

The age-old "at least three places"
Don't store what I don't strictly need
Accessible & simple: the less I have to fiddle, the more sustainable it is (kind of seems to conflict with 1)
Privacy-first, don't trust clouds, etc (kind of sems to conflict with 1, too!)

I'm not sure (a) if there are any other principles to keep in mind while designing a system that works for me or (b) how this might translate into practical advice about hardware or software solutions. If anything has or hasn't worked for you personally, please share. My daily driver is a LineageOS tablet and it's not clear to me how to best keep its data safe.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

I'm not a fan of backups. They are a special path that is orthogonal to how you use computers, meaning it's additional time and energy you need just for finding relevant hosts, doing the copies regularly and most of all *actually test that the copy went well* (ie test the backup) which gets more and more irportant the longer your system is in place.

I opted for a different strategy: I have a folder for my photos and another folder for my "Documents" (at large). They both exist on my computer and on my phone and are synchronised with syncthing. I also have extra copies on other servers, one of which keeps old versions but I have never had the actual use for it, which is good because I have never checked it works correctly.

Compared to a backup I have the thing that works seamlessly in the background (I don't fiddle with some shell scripts that fail because I put single quotes instead of double quotes), I actually test the oopy works because I use files on two different devices, and the fact that everything is bluntly copied means I am forced to think "is it worth keeping". I aim to keep my folders under 50GB combined, which is a lot for a phone but nothing in the grand scheme of thing. Most of that is actually videos I pre-download to watch them online while on the move but that's another thing.

Syncthing means I can trivially add new devices as life goes on and old ones die

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