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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Data hoarding is a truly unique experience. Just my two cents

    • raid is not a backup. Don’t use raid5 unless you’re using a filesystem like zfs that checksums your data. Raid5 is vulnerable to scenarios with a “write hole” that leads to bit rot.

    • split up your dataset into smaller more manageable datasets so you can more easily back it up in different ways like external drives, cloud storage, etc. You can then limit the dataset size to never exceed the same of your backup target.

    • snapshots, use them. Snapshots in your filesystem can make your backups more manageable by only sending the differential data as opposed to something like Rsync which may need to rsync an entire file.

    I use ZFS and have found that compression with ZSTD works pretty well for getting extra use out of your disks but unless you have a lot of RAM and some special metadata NVME disks, don’t use reduplication as it will be a serious performance impact.

    Now if you aren’t using a FOSS system like truenas and instead you’re using a system like a qnap off the shelf, the qnap hybrid backup and sync manager has a really elegant solution for doing policy based differential backups to back blaze b2 storage. Not only does this give you a copy of your data, you also get immutable points in time archives of your data.

    Good luck in your data hoarding endeavors!





  • Im pretty sure this method utilizes RDP. I’m thinking about getting an Intel ARC380 GPU for PCI-E pass through to a windows VM and doing the same thing. I’ve tested this with an Nvidia Tesla k80 (though it’s not a very practical card to have on a desktop). You should be able to get enhanced performance out of the VM if you enforce video encoding on GPU via group policy.

    The only downsides are :

    1. passing certain peripherals through RDP fails on Linux from my experience (for example, USB DAC, Xbox 360 USB controller). Your mileage may vary.
    2. absolute mouse position doesn’t work over RDP so don’t try this with any games that need a mouse for camera control (fps) it simply won’t work. If you want to game, lookingglass would probably be better for that but I haven’t tested that yet.










  • My favorite trick to reviving old computers is trying to find ways to get them to run off of solid state storage. It really makes a huge difference. You will be surprised by how much more tolerable classic computers are when you no longer have to deal with slow storage mediums.

    Mind you this doesn’t make them modern levels of fast and you no longer get the satisfaction of hearing the hard drive grinding away when you open a window but thems the tradeoffs…sigh…