what you are attempting is called high availability; it might not be worth it; usually would need three different physical devices (in a homelab situation)…a load balancer to route traffic, and two nodes to handle said traffic. to perform your storage upgrade, you pull one device out of the load balancer, do your upgrade, and then add it back in. then, you do the same for the other load balancer. this would have 100% service availability…but this is a lot of work for a one-person show!

do that for fun - you do you. however, if you can handle a few hours of downtime and don’t want to burden yourself with the long time care+feeding the above setup will require…

remember you can use USB boot, mount both your drives, and then if you are lucky, your distro (on USB) will have a disk management/cloning utility.

click click click, boom…you have bit perfect copy of small M2 on to large M2.

Do not change your small M2! power down, swap 'em, and power on! if it doesn’t work, you still have your OG M2 to boot from.

there are backup/restore utilities and other ways, each taking more and more time…but M2 is pretty quick.

Actually…for a NAS, your network link is your limit.

You could have 4xPCIe5 M.2’s in full-raid, saturating your bus w/64Gb/s of glory, but if you are on 1Gb/s wifi, that’s what you’ll actually get.

Still, would be fun to ssh in and dupe 1TB in seconds, just for the giggles. Do it for the fun!

Remember, it is almost always cheaper and fast enough to use a Thunderbolt / high-speed USB4/40Gbs flash drive for a quick backup.

Certain cloud providers are as secure, if not more secure, than a home lab. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, et al. are responding to 0-day vulnerabilities on the reg. In a home lab, that is on you.

To me, self-hosted means you deploy, operate, and maintain your services.

Why? Varied…the most crucial reason is 1) it is fun because 2) they work.

This is a great question. The photo ecosystem is one where I haven’t found a FOSS soln that hits all the marks of subscription services. I would focus on whatever helps you search.

I do feel like if files have accurate dates in the file system and in metadata, then folders based on event make sense.

However subscription photo services are very good at automatically sorting - these dates are holidays so these pictures are probably for that holiday. Your home location is here, these pictures are over there so this must be your trip to there. These pictures have these people or animals, so these pictures are about them.

With that comes seamless integration across devices - a picture taken at time now can be seen on a tv or laptop at time +x. Etc.

I have left the FOSS photo world but am definitely interested to see where it is. With digital photography finding pictures is the real trick. using folders like a tag hierarchy at least gets you in the ball park imo. But I have no practical knowledge any more.

Depends, it’s all a gamble. Think of it like this … how much do you spend on your kit? A top end GPU is $1500 USD. A decent surge protector might cost $15. However suppose you cheap out and get one for $9.99…then a surge blows thru it and smokes your mobo&gpu. how much did that $5 in savings cost you?

there is quite a bit that goes into it. And yet it’s not magic. Also, protection does wear out as load & surge is applied. So it’s not really worth it to pay top end, over and over, at least imo.

Remember power!

First and foremost, well-grounded power is essential. I haven’t done the whole house thing yet, but I am thinking about it and curious to know of other’s stories.

For surge protectors, I like GE wall taps for form factor and Furman racks when there is space & need.

For an uninterruptible power supply, I like APC. While they aren’t made in the USA like they used to (RIP), they have been reliable for me.

Network (ISP Modem, WIFI, Switch) and tower CPU are all driven by UPS power. APC UPS, at least, is always drawing off the battery, so the upstream electronics are protected…a massive surge is far more likely to take out the battery. For laptops, surge protection is enough.

I have not yet surge-protected the ISP lower power input… this is a real risk! I found a cheap one off Amazon, but I am worried it will degrade the network --> whole house may be better.

Note - I have had a lightning strike get sent down the cable line, enter the home, blow out the cable modem, traverse into the network switch, blow out the switch, and nuke every active ethernet port (NAS, Apple TV, etc.), as well as jump the wire into low power security, physically blowing a hard-wired security panel off the wall and damaging a few hard-wired security points. Pretty crazy!

many people aren’t running containers on RBpi … while feasible, it was notoriously poor until the 8GB pi4, and still is easily bounded by SD card I/o. are there docker stats so you can see the disk + net I/o of each container?

Sounds like fun but watch out for man in middle…home tech support!

Remember upper executive mgmt (wife) will have priority demands and expect to bypass all support/ticketing processes c/o direct access/shoulder tap, 24x7.

Tip - create high priority user stories for your upper exec mgmt needs and your rest activities (sports, call of duty, tinkering in garage/shop/man cave, etc etc etc et al) so your impl supports your key stakeholders while also aligning with your favorite best practices.

.local is the important part imo—actually, tbh I am not a super fan of the .local dns method and how it punks networks (basically like entering a crowded bar and yelling YO BRAH!) BUT it is simple and low effort (see high pri user stories).

Good luck with your PI plan, could you include us in PI retrospective so we can learn from you? Godspeed.

:]