Nine

Restic, it has native S3 compatibility and when you combine with something like B2 it makes amazing offsite storage so you can enjoy the tried and true 3-2-1 backup strategy.

Also fedora magazine did a few posts on setting it up with systemd that makes it SUPER EASY to get going if you need a guide.

I have an ansible role that configures it on everyone’s laptops so that they have local, NAS, and remote, B2, backup locations.

Works like a charm for the past 8+ years.

MacOS, nearly everyone who does anything with development or ops is using a MacBook. Though lately more “normal” employees have been getting MacBooks too.

Waaaaay better.

Restic allows you to make dedupe snapshots of your data. Everything is there and it’s damn hard to loose anything. I use backblaze b2 as my long term end point / offsite… some will use AWS glacier. But you don’t have to use any cloud services. You can just have a restic repository on some external drives. That’s what I use for my second copy of things. I also will do an annual backup to a hard disk that I leave with a friend for a second offsite copy.

I’ve been backing up all of my stuff like this for years now. I used to use BORG which is another great tool. But restic is more flexible with allowing multiple systems to use a single repository and has native support for things like B2 that BORG doesn’t.

We also use restic to backup control nodes for some of supercomputing clusters I manage. It’s that rock solid imho.

To be honest, there’s a few good comments linking to scripts and methods here to batch convert them on a windows pc/vm. That’s the best way to go.

To add on to their comments. If you’re just interested in preserving them then maybe printing them to pdf, specifically pdf/a, would be my approach once you got them opened.

I’ll leave this one here for someone:

You can tunnel L2 over OpenVPN. Just bridge your interfaces in both sides and it works.

That way if you need to provision a VOIP phone or just have something NetBoot remotely. Not that I recommend doing that…

TBH have you tried just basic git? There’s a web interface built into git itself and you can use ssh for your repositories. It’s simple and just works. If you need a faster web interface there’s also cgit. There’s no bells and whistles either. Just configure ssh, drop your repos in /srv and get to work.

If you need more that just standard basic git the. The other suggestions here are great especially forgjo!

I use backblaze b2 for my storage. I use restic to backup everything to it. It works well and I’ve had it going for YEARS at this point. For things I could never replaced, like photos, I use external drives in addition to B2. Everyone knows that if something happens and we need to leave to just grab the drive that is stuck to the wall and the family photos will be safe.

My though process goes like this, everything backups to my home server. I have snap shots of the data on a normal basis. So if I need to get something back, going to a snap shot is pretty simple. If for some reason my server(s) just stopped existing for some reason I could pull it back from B2. I’ve only had to actually restore from B2 a handful of times and it was worth it.

Yeah, it was always too much for me. But I know quite a few people who run their entire business on it and they’re not small by any means. They hired some people to do custom work for modules too. They all started as small businesses too with Odoo and it just grew with them

Restic

Odoo

XMPP is fantastic IMHO

If you want to support a great project and have great uptime check out conversations.im

I don’t recommend self hosting something you want available all the time. That being said everyone has different needs/uses 😊

Like everyone has said there’s way better ways of doing it.

HOWEVER if you wanted to use dd you totally could. I’d recommend piping into something like gzip/zstd to save some space though.

dd if=/dev/sda | gzip >/mnt/backup_disk/sda.gz

You could also use restic backup the raw block device too.

That being said, clonezilla is exactly what you want

Fedora Server, Rocky Linux, and/or Free RHEL dev license. That’s what I use for all of my stuff.

For containers I use podman kube. For storage I use ZFS and VDO.

Rocky & RHEL

Everyday. I’ve got a lot of stuff that uses it. Granted most of it was mostly created a decade ago but with minimal maintenance it works great. The most helpful script is parsing megacli outputs so I can get a heads up on drive failures and rebuilds among other things.

I just came across this - https://fedoramagazine.org/d-bus-overview/ - and I think it explains it pretty well.

I’m wasn’t implying that you shouldn’t host it yourself at all. Just maybe use a VPS for hosting it yourself.

Getting buy in on the family & friends aspect is being able to match or exceed the popular free services. If there’s a perception that it’s not reliable then it’s highly unlikely they’ll keep using it. So the last thing you want is to have something happen to your internet connection, NAS, etc. At the end of the day it’s the pesky perception equals reality thing that dooms things like this and tanks the spouse approval factor.

Self hosting XMPP works well for most internal things. IMHO communication software that you’re relying on shouldn’t be hosted at home.

Both of those that you mentioned are great. I’ve used ejabberd in addition to that. I think prosody is better. Here’s a link to a list of more servers.

Another option since XMPP can do E2EE is use conversations.im it is my go to for XMPP hosting.

To add to this systemd can do everything they can. You can isolate network, do fire-walling, and sandboxing pretty easily. Any OCI container can be used too if you don’t want to install something too.

I could just do more with it.

I didn’t have a lot of money and went dumpster diving for parts. Changed out a bad capacitor and got a system booting. This was back in Pentium 3 and 4 days. I found a 512MB stick of memory that had some bad areas. Linux was able to map around it with some kernel options at boot. Since I had limited storage I used knoppix and had a print out of the needed kernel options and memory addresses.

Once it was up and running I was able to do anything and everything I wanted. I did built a better system and got gentoo going a year or so later.

Eventually I got gaming mostly working with the project that eventually became crossover. First software I ever purchased too. I started dual booting less.

I bounced back and forth between windows and Linux and when I built a system around 2010 I didn’t even bother configuring it for dual booting.

I haven’t really touched anything windows since around the release of Windows 10 and only used windows 7 for work reasons prior. These days I’m pretty useless with anything on that end.

So I’m an evangelical fan of Linux. I use it everywhere I can and the FOSS philosophy resonates with me. I advocate for it where it makes sense and works. I’ll go out of my way and spend time & money helping people move into it too.