My primary use case is safeguarding my important personal artifacts (family photos, digitized paperwork, encryption key / account recovery / 2FA backups) against drive failure (~2TB), followed by my decently sized Plex server (23TB), immich, nextcloud, and various other small things like selfhosted bitwarden, grocy, ollama, and stuff like that.

I run all of my stuff off of a 6 bay Synology (more drives helps with capacity efficiency as double redundancy with 6 drives costs you 30% and I wanted to be protected against drive failures during rebuilding) with an Intel nuc on top to run plex/jellyfin transcoding using quicksync instead of loading the poor nas with cpu transcoding, I also run ollama on the nuc since it has faster cores than the nas.

Personally I’m hoping for a John Oliver + Onion collab with the Infowars studio

It’s from the Onion! The artist is Ward Sutton but he’s drawing the comics from the point of view of a character named “Kelly” who is a parody of an old right wing guy (according to the Internet) who hates political correctness, hence the exaggerated scenarios in the comics. The “haha yes” sickos guy (who I guess sometimes shows up in a thought bubble) usually feels like a parody of how the right views various left wing policies in that the comic overplays / exaggerates the disastrous effects of said policies (to make fun of how absurd those fears are) while the “leftist sickos” cheer on the disastrous results.

The comics basically make fun of how extremely the right views progressive policy and the sickos guy is kind of pointing out how absurd it is to view someone as bad faith (ie a sicko knowingly cheering on the disastrous effects of a progressive policy) who supports something as simple as green energy, drug legalization, or bike lanes. It’s fun to use as a reaction image to anything progressive happening because obviously wanting something like for example affordable healthcare obviously doesn’t make you a sicko. (Or in this case wanting a terrible person to actually face actual legal consequences for the harm they’ve done)

I’ve done a backup swap with friends a couple times. Security wasn’t much of a worry since we connected to each other’s boxes over ssh or wireguard or similar and used tools that allowed encryption. The biggest challenge for us was that in my selfhosting friend group we all prefer different protocols so we had to figure out what each of us wanted to use to connect and access filesystems and set that up. The second challenge was ensuring uptime and that the remote access we set up for each other stayed up - and that’s what killed the project as we all eventually stopped maintaining the remote access and nobody seemed to care - so if I were to do it again I would make sure all participants have alerts monitoring their shared endpoint.

I hope they get wrecked and the company gets imploded

It should be safe, using fstab is how I do a network mount to a specific folder also so it doesn’t change or anything.

Isn’t Miracast for sending video data? The thing I like about Chromecast is that the phone or remote app just tells the Chromecast where to load the media directly from, and then only sends playback control commands. That makes it a lot lighter resource wise because you don’t need to proxy the stream through a device like a phone that wants to go to sleep to save battery.

Note that the 2x10G is SFP+ not SFP. I was briefly confused. I have tons of SFP+ stuff but no SFP gear whatsoever

I went with the DS1621xs+, the main driving factors being:

• that I already had a 6 drive raidz2 array in truenas and wanted to keep the same configuration
• I also wanted to have ECC, which while maybe not necessary, the most valuable thing I store is family photos which I want to do everything within my budget to protect.

If I remember correctly only the 1621xs+ met those requirements, though if I was willing to go without ECC (which requires going with xeon) then the DS620slim would have given me 6 bays and integrated graphics which includes quicksync and would have allowed me to do power efficient transcoding and thus running Plex/jf right on the nas. So there’s tradeoffs, but I tend to lean towards overkill.

If you know what level of redundancy you want and how many drives you want to be running considering how much the drives will cost, whether you want an extra level of redundancy while rebuilds are happening after 1 failure, how much space is sacrificed to parity, then that’s a good way to narrow down off the shelf nases if you go that way. Newegg’s NAS builder comes in handy if you just select “All” capacities and then use the nas filters by number of drive bays, then you can compare whats left.

And since the 1621xs+ has a pretty powerful xeon, I run most things on the nas itself. Synology supports docker and docker compose out of the box (once the container app is installed), so I just ssh into the box and keep my compose folders somewhere in the btrfs volume. Docker nicely allows anything to be run without worrying about dependencies being available on the host OS, the only gotcha is kernel stuff since docker containers share the host kernel - for example wire guard which relies on kernel support I could only get to work using a user space wire guard docker container (using boringtun) and after the VPN/tail scale app is installed (presumably because that adds tap/tun interfaces that’s needed for vpn containers to work.

Only jellyfin/Plex is on my NUC. On the nas I run:

• Adguard

• Sonarr/radarr/lidarr/prowlarr/transmission/overseerr

• Castblock

• Grocy

• Nextcloud

• A few nginx instances for websites

• Uptime-kuma

• Vaultwarden

• Traefik and wire guard which connects to a vps as a reverse proxy for anything that needs to be accessible from the public internet

Just want to second this - I use an Intel nuc10i7 that has quicksync for Plex/jellyfin, can transcode at least 8 streams simultaneously without breaking a sweat, probably more if you don’t have 4K, and a separate synology nas that mainly handles storage. I run docker containers on both and the nuc has my media mounted using a network share via a dedicated direct gigabit Ethernet connecting the two so I can keep all the filesystem access traffic off of my switch /LAN.

This strategy was to be able to pick the best nas based on my redundancy needs (raidz2 / btrfs with double redundancy for my irreplaceable personal family memories) while being able to get a cost effective low power quicksync device for transcoding my media collection, which is the strategy I chose over pre-transcoding or keeping multiple qualities in order to save HDD space and be flexible to the low bandwidth requirements of whoever I share with who has a slow connection.