bluGill

Ann reason you choose authenik? There are a nmber of options and I’m not sure why to choose one over the other.

Pi’s built in audio is terrible. Even if it works you will want a better audio interface. The PI only has digital inputs (I think there is a mic input), so you need something to get audio in. If you can get the digital audio that is best, but often that is behind encryption and so you end up with analog inputs. (I’m not sure what the options here are, worth looking deeper).

Once you have the audio in, there are a number of Jack (which port audio supports) to network low latency products that will work. Configuration will be hard but that is something you only do once. (configuration is hard because almost everyone who uses this wants a different complex setup and so there is no way to make it easy in a way that would help anyone else)

I was thinking about restoring the backup in a temporary location and running diff on random files to check the files match the source, but I don’t know if this is redundant now.

That isn’t as useful as you would think. If your computer fails there are high odds you will restore to a fresh install of a newer OS and newer software/services versions. Which means that you really want/need to also test data/config migration.

OTOH, if you have backups odds are the data is there even if you never tested them. Testing you can restore is mostly about do you have everything backed up. Your backups can pass all the validation but if you accidentally configured them to only backup /tmp (or something else worthless) you may as well not have backups. Thus you should test that you can do a full restore just to make sure that the data you want is all there. I generally trust that backup software can restore all the data you pointed it at without problems even if you didn’t test them - but I don’t trust that you (or I) configured them to backup the right things.

Back in the 70’s my dad worked for controll data - I think when Cray still worked for them. One day uniforned military came to the lab he was in with a failed haredrived handcuffed to them (i’m guessing this would have been a 14 inch drive?). They watched while the lab opened the drive to find physically warped platters, then used rags to wipe the oxide off, took the rags tothe parking lot and burned them.

not sure how practical that is for you but it was once the standard to be sure.

Spring break so nothing this weekend. I need to figure out backups and then common passwords/logins for my family.

I use magic mirror for that. I tried homeeassistant but I’m alleric to a million PIs and they make installing any other way hard. (Rant about vm versions not supporting extentions)

what is thisyarty thing

Email is often impossible. you can run your own server but you won’t be able to send email to many people because gmail and other larre providers will ignore everything from any ip address you can get. you endeup with email for only people on you server and the what is the point.

just a warning there. Some do self host email but it is the most difficult to host. My life is much better now that I pay fastmail to handle my email.

Just remember any backup is better than nothing. Even if the backup is done wrong (this includes untested!) odds are you can read it and extract at least some data, it just may take a lot of time. Backups that are done right just mean that when (not if!) your computers break you are quickly back up and running.

There are several reasons to backup data only and not the full system. First you may be unable to find a computer exactly/enough like the one that broke, and so the old system backup won’t even run. Second, even if you can find an identical enough system, do you want to, or maybe it is time to upgrade anyway - there are pros and cons of arm (raspberry pi) vs x86 servers (there are other obscure options you might want but those are the main ones), and you may want to switch anyway since you have. Third, odds are some of the services need to be upgraded and so you may as well use this forced computer time to apply the upgrade. Last, you may change how many servers you have, should you split services to different computers, or maybe consolidate the services on the system that died to some other server you already have.

The only advantage of a full system backup is when they work they are the fastest way to get going again.