• 4 Posts
  • 59 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • I like the idea, but wonder if a lemmy community may have been just as good. The main friction I think many of us will have is “one more place to go to”. Also, I think the founders likely should step up to create content initially otherwise you run into

    • New user visits
    • Nothing here to see… I like the idea; will bookmark to check later
    • Later never comes and the person just forgets about the project

    In my opinion the founders need to create some, even if minimal, value for new users until there is a critical mass.






  • My take on the article

    • If it was written by AI, the author should have done a manual pass to simplify it and make it more approachable
    • If it was not written by AI, the author should probably have asked AI to review for readability

    Either way, the article was done in such a way that it is hard to read. It also misses

    • Why should I care about this?
    • Why does this matter?

    At least those things were missing early on in the article. I scanned through it, but the article did not seem to take into account explaining why one should spend cycles reading this.



  • Recommend you follow the 321 backup strategy. Adopted to modern times I would say it is broadly:

    • Have your data in more than 1 place
    • Use more than one provider
    • One of your types of backups should be physical media like an external hard drive.

    From what you described if apple was to wipe your data[1] you would be completely out of luck… for example if something deletes data in your Mac and then that deletion gets synced… For the most part syncing data is not a backup.

    Lastly, recommend you try to put all your critical data in one folder, or identify folders with critical data and prioritize backup of those first while you figure out the rest.

    [1] Not only can a deletion “sync” from your mac, but there can be any number of issues… like a bad update to a file. There is also the possibility, no matter how small, that apple could wipe your data. Over time you always see news of “company X deleted entire set of data for user/company Y”.


  • If you have any thoughts of making any money of the code that may be a reason to give the license some thought. Anything else, these days, is just a LLM away from getting re-written regardless of whatever license you use. For example there is a service that takes any code, uses one agent to create requirements and another to use those requirements to create a comparable program; the claim is that the second agent did not “steal” your code since it purely worked off requirements. Sure, it likely won’t be as good, but it allows someone to take a significant part of your code for themselves. That was, more or less, always there in the past is just that now is near trivial to do.

    Also, there are projects that are just fake open source. Like a project I saw yesterday with a restrictive license, but then has a CLA.

    • AGPL restrictive copyleft license – good
    • CLA (Contributor License Agreement) — a legal agreement where you grant the project maintainers additional rights over your contribution, often including the right to relicense it under different terms – not good

    So, that project at first sight appears like it is open, but because of the CLA the authors may just take whatever contributions you do to the project and then change it’s license.



  • You still need some means of outside backup. Figure what you have covers majority of scenarios, so now we are getting into the highly unlikely, but highly impact full like “my house burned down and now I have no data”. Something like B2 (or some other block storage with comparable pricing) is worth exploring.

    You also need to consider your usage pattern like whether you may need to retrieve data (some providers charge for bandwith in / out). I would suspect most of the time between your ZFS snapshots and your disk you are covered.

    Also, recommend to not leave the disk plugged in at all times for the scenario I mentioned: Your machine is compromised and the attacker encrypts data to ask for ransom; very low probability (I suspect those are mostly against companies), but really doesn’t hurt to prevent against it.


  • yes the ZFS snapshots are in the same disk, but the most common scenario when you need backups is to get a handful of files in which case the ZFS snapshots are super convenient and they use very little space. I use restic + (B2 | sftp) and zfs snapshots. I may literally go years without needing to restore from restic because most of the time I can get what I need from the zfs snapshots.

    You did not mention if you are using a single disk or more. If you can afford it and the machine allows it, doing mirroring or RAID-Z1 (equivalent of RAID 5) is a good option


  • Suggest:

    • Frequent ZFS snashots. There are scripts to make this easier like zfsSnap
    • Two external backups which you rotate weekly [1]
    • Instead of borg backup of ZFS pools if you have another machine you could sync the volumes to another machine or even use rsync to another machine of the data [2]

    You did not mention where the target of the borg backup is, but you want an external service. I believe there is a service that works wells with borg backup, but have not used it.

    Notes [1] Spinning disks are affordable. I suggest at least 2 because if you only have one and your machine was compromised, think disk encrypting malware, you disk may be encrypted too. Also, if the disk dies there goes your external drive backup

    [2] If you have another machine with enough space to host a copy that is a good option. Also, there are services that offer backup/disk VMs. They have very slow CPUs and affordable disk. Those may be work checking