BartyDeCanter

I use PorkBun. I didn’t have to upload any id, but I pay with a credit card so they do have my name and whatnot. They have a pretty decent API to manage whatever you need.

Immich is great. I run a small friends and family instance on a NAS and I’ve never had a hiccup that took more than ten minutes to fix. My backup system is borg to a Hetzner storage box nightly with a healthchecks.io check set to email me if it goes more than 48 hours without a success. Cheap, reliable, and fast enough for me.

In iOS there is an app called ShutterDeclutter that every day shows you the all photos you took on that day of the year in your collection and has a swipe left/right to delete or keep each one. It makes the job of reviewing photos manageable for people with multi decade long albums. I really want Immich to add that feature.

You mean run TaskWarrior and host a sync server, right?

Take my upvote and get out.

Congratulations! I’ve been using Jellyfin for several years now and the quality has consistently improved. It’s a great tool.

I run Vaultwarden on a VPS for some family and friends, along with a few other services. The way I have dealt with this is a physical printed out letter that explains the basic setup, where my digital notes/config/dockerfiles are, and most importantly what bills need paid to keep it all running. Next to that is a sealed envelope with recovery passwords to my vault and some other things.

Both of them are kept next to my will in a filing cabinet, so that if I’m hit by a bus my family will have the info on what to do. The system is stable and the bills are on autopay, so they won’t have to immediately deal with it, but the instructions are there when ready. As part of it I have designated a friend as my “digital executor” to follow the instructions.

The general outline of the letter is:

To whoever is handling my affairs, thank you for reading this. This letter explains a small collection of computers I run that some friends and family rely on for photos, passwords, and a few other things. Nothing here is an emergency in the first hours or days. The goal of this letter is to help you keep things running long enough for those people to copy their own data out, and then shut everything down cleanly. You do not need to be technical to do the first and most important parts. The later parts will need a technical person, and I name one below.

A companion to this letter is a SEALED ENVELOPE that contains the passwords, keys, and account logins. This letter deliberately contains NO passwords or secrets. If you have this letter but not the sealed envelope, find the envelope before going further - almost nothing can be accessed without it. Checklist of what the envelope should contain is in Section 7.

1. Short Overview
2. Service/Hardware/Users Chart
3. The Bills to Pay
4. The Password Manager
5. What to Do
6. Full Instructions and Notes Location
7. The Sealed Envelope Contents
8. Digital Executor

I don’t have an exact number, but backing from California to a Hetzner box in Germany via Borg has always been surprisingly fast for the price and that it’s going halfway around the world. I want to say 25-30MB/s? I think people in the EU are reporting getting over 100MB/s.

1. Follow the Trash Guides exactly for your arr stack setup. Don’t try to get fancy or take a shortcut. If you’ve already set up something differently, just redo it. Better to spend a little time now than a lot later.
2. Set up Tailscale. The free tier is probably fine for you, but if you’re extra paranoid you can run your own Headscale server instead.
3. Take notes. What you set up, what your docker files and configs are, and add any troubleshooting info as it comes up.
4. Use a password manager and keep everything in it.

Sure, if that’s what you want to do. Though, you’ll probably find less references and expertise here. There is a reason that even Microsoft runs Linux on most of its own servers.

lol, I kinda do. It’s this weirdly and wonderfully idyllic town that feels like what a small town should be, while still being very progressive and queer friendly.

As for the meds, I’m trying to stock up, but mine are pretty restricted so at most I’m getting one or two spares per month. My partners are more reasonable, so they have a larger cushion.

In that level of extreme disaster, honestly not going to be caring. But I did have a layered approach to less extreme more realistic scenarios.

Neighbors and Community

The most important thing in a real emergency. We know our neighbors, chat with them on the street and in line for the weekly ice cream truck. We have several close friends within an easy walk or bike ride and are part of a local social club that we go to every week. We’ve had the emergency chat with many of them.

Power

15 minute UPS on my NAS will get me through small power bumps. I also have a large backup battery meant for camping with solar panels that lets my partner and I go indefinitely without city power for our medical devices, with enough to spare most days to keep our phones topped off. I’m currently using it a a oversized UPS for my desktop, but in a real emergency I’ll shut that down and move it to the bedroom.

Longer term, we’re planning on getting solar+house scale battery. I had one before and it got us though multiple days without power as long as we were careful.

Food, water and general supplies

55 gallon food safe drum of drinking water with the tablets that keep it safe for years. I have a todo item that reminds me to rotate it out every three years. We have two emergency bins, one with a hand crank/solar/usb powered radio and flashlight and assorted emergency supplies. The other has freeze dried hiking meals. They were the cheapest per meal per year of shelf life last time I did the math.

Medications

A real gap. I can’t get more than a one month supply of my meds, similar for my partner. While neither of us have immediate life threatening problems without them, we’d both be in rough shape in different ways. Don’t know what to do about this.

Backups

My desktop, my partners laptop, the NAS, and my VPS all have offsite backups to another country halfway around the world. I test recovery annually, and use healthchecks.io to notify me if they stop doing their daily backup. I need to finish getting my laptop backup running, but it’s been low priority as I mostly use it as a thin client for my desktop and keep a few files synced with Syncthing.

VPS

A few critical services run on it instead of my at-home NAS in case our home internet connection fails. It’s physically located several hundred miles away. Again, backed up elsewhere so I can relatively quickly recover it if needed.

NAS

Hot-swappable 4-disk raid with a spare sitting in the closet. That should get me through most issues, with the offsite backups for things that don’t. It also pings healthchecks with a few daily self diagnostics.

RaspPi

Really just running PiHole, so the only data to back up is the split dns config which lives in my notes on my desktop. Seems like a weak point, but could be replaced by the NAS, router, or my laptop pretty quickly.

Mobile devices

Backed up to their corresponding corporate overlords, except for photos and videos which go to immich on the NAS. I wish I had a better solution here.

Me

I have a notes directory describing the setup with configuration, docker files and playbooks for the various services in a local git repo on my desktop. I have printouts of the assorted recovery codes and a letter explaining all this in my filing cabinet alongside my will and advanced directives. We have enough technical friends that my partner can ask one to help, or just point an LLM at the note files and have it walk them through most things. I’ve audited the notes and git history for credentials and it’s clean. Just IPs and machine names, lists of services on each, clean docker files and basic maintenance instructions.

I think my biggest gap is what to do in a dual-failure case where I lose my home internet connection, and my desktop ssd fails. My data would be safe in the offsite, but I wouldn’t be able to reinstall Debian. My laptop would let me take care of most things for a while, but maybe I need to set up a mirror…

Have you taken a look at TaskWarrior? It’s pure FOSS, extremely powerful, has multiple self hosting options, multiple front ends, including Android native, and supports everything on your list. Simple projects, fully nested projects with complex dependencies, customizable tags and filters, supports GTD, kanban, or just a basic list of todos. Asynchronous synchronization for devices that can’t connect for long periods for whatever reason. It weakest point is that it’s recurring task model is weird, but there is very active work to fix that.

It also has a huge plugin ecosystem and can pull from things like jira and tons of other issue tracking systems.

It’s also extremely neckbeardy, has a boring website, decent online documentation but a much better man page. TaskWarrior is highly scriptable, with json input/output options if you like. I love it.

EDIT: The filter from your example would be written +OVERDUE +do_it_later proj:yard in TaskWarrior’s filter method.

EDITx2: I use Debian Stable, btw. ;)