> I think about it in terms of what will happen when I die and what I will be inflicting on my family as the ridiculous setups stop working.
I run proxmox too and I've now got a nice little infra at home.
For my family it's simple: I explained them that the infra doesn't matter. The only thing that matter is data. And that there are many, many, many redundant backups of the data and that the backups are functional. That the data are correct (not a single bit missing) and pristine (deduplicated etc.).
Basically 20 years of family pictures and family movies, notarized documents, many proofs of big money transfer (as we now live in an hellhole of KYC/AML where I constantly need to prove money transfer, even when they're so old my banks don't allow me to get that info anymore), all the invoices related to real estate, medical stuff, cars, etc.
My backup procedure uses an intermediary steps that restore the data from the backup and verifies that the data is correct: once that step passes, the backup gets the greenlight. 3-2-1. Even more than 3-2-1.
Cryptographic hashes everywhere, including in filenames: I've got scripts that do verify x% of the files, random sampling style. I'm 100% guaranteed that at least 99.999% of the files are correct. And there are so many backups (online, offline, onsite, offsite, ...), all checksumed. My family won't lose our data. They're literally in various safe and in several countries.
Once I won't be there, they'll have the data up to that point. FWIW both my wife, daughter and brother --although they're not techies-- all happen to be familiar with computers and all took Python lessons. They know what a CLI is.
So even should they have a problem hooking up a hard disk, there's not a world in which they cannot do that:
"LLM> Dear AI, I've got disks with backups of family pictures and notarized documents, how can I access them?"
The world where you couldn't ask that question doesn't exist anymore.
Data of new memories shall be theirs to do deal with though.
P.S: besides that I think homelab'ing is also for convenience and understanding how things (like the network and servers) do work. It's to me more about thinkering and learning than "controlling".
I run proxmox too and I've now got a nice little infra at home.
For my family it's simple: I explained them that the infra doesn't matter. The only thing that matter is data. And that there are many, many, many redundant backups of the data and that the backups are functional. That the data are correct (not a single bit missing) and pristine (deduplicated etc.).
Basically 20 years of family pictures and family movies, notarized documents, many proofs of big money transfer (as we now live in an hellhole of KYC/AML where I constantly need to prove money transfer, even when they're so old my banks don't allow me to get that info anymore), all the invoices related to real estate, medical stuff, cars, etc.
My backup procedure uses an intermediary steps that restore the data from the backup and verifies that the data is correct: once that step passes, the backup gets the greenlight. 3-2-1. Even more than 3-2-1.
Cryptographic hashes everywhere, including in filenames: I've got scripts that do verify x% of the files, random sampling style. I'm 100% guaranteed that at least 99.999% of the files are correct. And there are so many backups (online, offline, onsite, offsite, ...), all checksumed. My family won't lose our data. They're literally in various safe and in several countries.
Once I won't be there, they'll have the data up to that point. FWIW both my wife, daughter and brother --although they're not techies-- all happen to be familiar with computers and all took Python lessons. They know what a CLI is.
So even should they have a problem hooking up a hard disk, there's not a world in which they cannot do that:
"LLM> Dear AI, I've got disks with backups of family pictures and notarized documents, how can I access them?"
The world where you couldn't ask that question doesn't exist anymore.
Data of new memories shall be theirs to do deal with though.
P.S: besides that I think homelab'ing is also for convenience and understanding how things (like the network and servers) do work. It's to me more about thinkering and learning than "controlling".