I’m currently about halfway through setting up a home server on an old/refurbished Dell PC. It has enough compute to transcode if needed, but no more. I’ll have to upgrade the storage to set up RAID. For software, I am running xubuntu, which offers the benefits of the great community and documentation of Ubuntu. It is very beginner friendly, but is a bit simpler and lighter than gnome. I’m running everything I can as Docker containers.

Hi, I’m your customer base.

I’m a complete novice, no network or coding experience, but not afraid of computers either. I’m pretty worried about messing up something serious due to lack of knowledge.

In the end, I didn’t choose Synology or the like due to:

• lack of robust community support. I’ve noodled around with Linux for years and learned that community support is essential.

• price. I’d pay 10% or 50% more for a good pre-configured system, but not 3-4x more (which is just the general feeling I get from Synology)

• lack of configurability. I’m still not sure what I would like to do (and be able). I know I want to replace some storage services, replace some streaming services, control my smart home, maaaaybe access my files remotely, and probably some other stuff. I may want to have email or a website in the future, but that’s not on my radar right now.

If there were some plug-and-play hardware/software solution that was still affordable and open, it would be a good choice for me.

Just getting started but yeah, I have basically no technology background. Mostly I’m too stubborn to know when to quit something so here I am lol.

That’s good, it means you haven’t been pulled into the hyper-partisan rhetoric that has sought to make it a wedge issue. You’re right of course. It is not a black and white issue and we should be very cautious about those who portray it as such.

Like the comment I was replying to above.

The framing it in that way is propaganda, yes. I know I’m shouting into the void at this point, but anyway, you did bring it up.

1. Framing Jews as “foreign” and Arab Palestinians as native: Jews and Palestinians are both native to the Levant, and have lived there continuously for centuries (except possibly briefly during the crusades).

2. Jews and Arabs both migrated to Palestine in large numbers in the 19th and 20th centuries. Only one of those populations is referred to as “colonizers.”

3. Historic violence against Jews is minimized or labelled “resistance.” Historic violence against Arabs is labelled “oppression.”

4. Extremists among Palestinian leaders are labeled as exceptions that don’t represent the people, while extremist Israeli leaders are considered representative.

Of course it’s fair to say that the opposite is true among Islamophobic worldviews - extremists among Muslims are considered to be representative, etc.

In the comments below, you will see silence or justification for these facts, but they will not be factually refuted.

Or alternatively, anti-Israel propaganda has succeeded after decades of effort to make Israel a partisan issue.

What is grade?

Speed as I understand it is the physical speed the drive spins, and is directly proportional (?) to the read/write speed.

How does a beginner know which is which? What should I look for, and how do I know if it’s a good investment or overkill for a home setup?

Add some green tabasco to Heinz ketchup for a little kick of flavor and spice

How about banning tips and forcing employers to pay the people working for them instead of the customers?

Thanks, I’ll give it a try!

Oh, that’s great! I don’t know how to do that, but I assume it’s pretty easy to Google, and I’ll need to set up an account?

I think the site chooses a random order of available apps and cuts off after a certain number. Not all apps will show up but if you narrow the list or refresh, then you can see all of those listed.

DownloadThemAll seems to be helping. I’ll update the original post with the details once I have success. In this case, I was able to first download them internally in the browser, then copy the download link and add them to DtA using the link. Someone smarter than me will be able to explain why the extra step was necessary, or how to avoid it.

I couldn’t get it working, but I didn’t try too hard. I may give it another shot. I’m trying a different approach right now.

Yeah, that introduces an issue of queuing and monitoring dozens of downloads rather than just a few. I had similar results.

As my family is continuing to add photos over the week, I see no way to verify that previously downloaded parts are identical to the same parts in another takeout. If that makes sense.

Thanks, I’ll give it a shot. The download links are a little weird due to the google authentication, so they can only be used from a logged in account.

This route may be the answer. I didn’t have success so far in setting up a download manager that offered any real improvements over the browser. I wanted to avoid my photos being on two corporate services, but as you say, in theory everything is delete-able.

Great, any suggestions?