Eh, I’ve broken laptop ethernet ports by accidentally plugging in passive POE into it. It happens if you’re an unfortunate soul who needs to debug those devices.

Active POE is fine. Passive POE is an accident waiting to happen when someone inevitably plugs it into the wrong device.

This is the self-hosted community, so that’s the context I was assuming.

My point is, how often do you actually need to restore from backup? If it’s frequent, consider a dedicated tool for whatever that thing is. If it’s infrequent, it’ll probably easier to just learn how to do it every five years or whatever.

If you like borg/restic/etc, by all means, use it.

My point is that most people probably don’t need it. Snapshots are something you set up once, and you should probably use them even if you’re using something like borg for any files that aren’t covered (e.g. config files on the server). Rsync is also something you set up once, and checking it is the same as any other service.

Sure, but you should probably be aware of what it is and what it does. It’s incredibly common and will be referenced in a ton of documentation for Linux server stuff.

I use rsync for all kinda of things:

• deploying static files to a public webserver (blog or whatever)
• backups - scheduled systems/cron task w/ SSH key
• copying stuff from a USB drive

I only really use scp if the system doesn’t already have rsync.

Yes, async copies files to the remote server, the remote server takes regular snapshots.

Why not just use a backup utility instead?

What is that utility providing that snapshots + rsync doesn’t. If rsync + snapshots is sufficient, why overcomplicate it with a backup utility?

Why not just cp?

And not waste time copying duplicate data. And for the typical home user, it’s probably mo slower than other options.

Yup, just configure a snapshot policy and you can recover deleted and modified files going back as long as you choose. And it is probably more space efficient than both/restic too.

Blogs can have ads.

For versioning/retention, just use snapshots in whatever filesystem you’re using (you are using a proper filesystem like ZFS or BTRFS, right?).

It doesn’t do diffs, so it’s really bad if there’s a lot of duplicate data.

That would only matter if it’s lots of small files, right? And after the initial sync, you’d have very few files, no?

Rsync is designed for incremental syncs, which is exactly what you want in a backup solution. If your multithreaded alternative doesn’t do a diff, rsync will win on larger data sets that don’t have rapid changes.

Yeah it’s slow

What’s slow about async? If you have a reasonably fast CPU and are merely syncing differences, it’s pretty quick.

The first thing I did was throw drives into my PC set up samba and minidlna so my SO and I could stream video to the TV.

But in an online discussion, someone made the argument that it needs to be a dedicated machine with unattended updates with providing storage as its only purpose or something to that effect. That seems overly limiting to me, but that seemed like a pretty common sentiment.

Surely there’s a line somewhere between someone making a share on their PC or attaching a USB drive to their router and a commercial NAS device. I don’t know where that line is, so I tend to be pretty conservative and assume a NAS device is dedicated to the purpose, whether DIY or purchased, but if it runs a bunch of other services, now it’s a “server” and not a NAS.

That’s why I’m suggesting the language here be more precise.

I was confused by the wording. It said something like, “do you have a NAS device on the network?” I don’t have a dedicated NAS, I have a device that provides NAS services (samba share, RAID, etc), as well as a dozen or so services (source code forge, budgeting app, etc). It’s all one device in my case, except for a handful of other services hosted elsewhere.

When given a yes or no in the middle of the survey, I’m left to guess what qualifies as a NAS device. I call mine a server that provides NAS services, though it was originally a NAS-only device (that’s why I bought the drives).

I’ve been in several online discussions where people claim I don’t have a “NAS device” because it’s not a dedicated device, and some even claim it needs to be something off the shelf like Synology to count. I think what trips me up is the word “device”.

Mine started that way, with Linux + BTRFS RAID + samba, then I added minidlna, then Jellyfin, then a bunch of additional services.

I think the survey should distinguish between an off-the-shelf NAS (Synology, TrueNAS, etc) and DIY, ask about filesystems/RAID (ZFS, BTRFS, EXT + software RAID, hardware RAID, no RAID).

I went with Jellyfin because it’s the one I use the most. It also gives me the most headaches, so it’s a mixed bag.

I wasn’t sure what to put for NAS device. I built my own NAS solution, but it’s not an OOTB NAS, so I picked “no”.