IanTwenty

You’ve made a great start. How much further you go depends on your needs and threat model.

Rsync is ok as a start but there are dedicated backup tools that will give you access to your files at any point in time. This is important if you delete a file and later need it back after an rsync has already run and deleted it remotely too.

Rsync will not encrypt your backups. If a burglar takes your Pi will they have easy access to all your files too?

With rsync+ssh you are also vulnerable to either yourself (more likely) or a rogue process on your own machine deleting the files over ssh (e.g. ransomware attack).

The answer to that is append-only backups. A backup tool like restic has a backend you can host that does exactly this:

The –append-only mode allows creation of new backups but prevents deletion and modification of existing backups. This can be useful when backing up systems that have a potential of being hacked.

https://github.com/restic/rest-server

Take a look at restic to see what else you gain from switching to a dedicated tool versus rsync:

https://github.com/restic/restic#design-principles

There are others too such as borg.

I’m not familiar with Pikapods but Monica v4 has trouble with notifications. First you need to ensure it’s been configured right to even send a test email, this can be trigered with a command if you have access:

php artisan monica:test-email

Various Monica environment variables must be set to configure this, it should be in the docs somewhere if not I can fish my config out for you.

Even once that’s working you’ll need Monica to run its regular jobs for sending notifications, there’s config for that too. Finally the code has bugs and will often miss reminders in my experience. There are some open bugs still on this and I guess the devs have moved onto their rewritten version (chandler):

https://github.com/monicahq/monica/issues/5681

According to the research team, this unique formation directly influences the movement of Antarctica’s massive sheet of ice. The network of hidden geological features determines where the glaciers overlaying it will flow, which makes studying it crucial for predicting how climate change will change the southern ice cap.

Interesting

F-droid themselves gave an update in April:

https://f-droid.org/en/2026/04/03/twif.html

If you’ve been holding off updating Syncthing-Fork we have two pieces of news for you. First, the original dev continues to collaborate still, we know this was a pain point back then. Second, we’ve just added BasicSync, A simple app for running Syncthing, which just controls Syncthing’s running behaviour as hands off as possible, while the original service hums in the background.

So it seems since the handover things have settled but there is also a new fork which takes a more bare-bones approach.