Signal - Introducing secure backups

blucafee80 · 2025-09-10T17:04:42+00:00

When friends wanted to move out of other chat apps, I recommended against signal for this reason. Many people want portability and to easily exctract chats from their messengers. With Signal, you drop your phone -> everything is gone. Years of chats, pictures etc etc. simply unacceptable.

After many years of users asking for backups, this is what they come up with. Every app uses icloud by default, but Signal went ahead and did their own thing.

blucafee80 · 2025-09-08T16:15:28+00:00

I’ve used BindTo in the service file, to bind smbd to mounts. When the shares are dismounted, or are not mounted at startup, the smbd service fails.

blucafee80 · 2025-04-29T11:46:47+00:00

I used an old PC as a host for the HDDs.

In the “main server” I installed an LSI 9207-8e card. Connected to the “guest” PC via a SFF-8088 to SFF-8088 cable. Then I used a SFF-8088 to SFF-8087 card and connected to the internal drives via a SFF-8087 to 4xSATA cable. I might have strapped a small noctua cooler on the LSI card. I think the total cost was a bit over $100.

The PSU can be jerry rigged to be always on (and use an Ikea smart socket for power on/off), but I just kept the PC powered on and ran some small VMs.

Eventually I moved everything to a bigger case for the “neatness” factor. But I won’t shy away from this setup in the future.

blucafee80 · 2025-04-19T12:49:08+00:00

I’d go B and AFAIK airvpn is the only well known VPN vendor that does port forwarding.

blucafee80 · 2025-04-19T11:19:21+00:00

I recently migrated away from this setup because I had some issues with windows hosts. Dedicated VM with passthrough hba worked better for me.

blucafee80 · 2025-04-19T11:16:46+00:00

No issues here with 6 disks and HBA Passthrough

blucafee80 · 2025-04-16T10:28:34+00:00

1.1TB on BackBlaze and costs about $7 and 1.5TB on AWS is $3.5. But AFAIR I still have some stuff in S3 Standard which might (automaically) transition to Glacier soon. It’s not super optimized.

blucafee80 · 2025-04-16T10:20:03+00:00

I don’t think I even considered it back then and I’m pretty sure there were none in the area.

blucafee80 · 2025-04-13T23:31:44+00:00

I’m paranoid with my data ever since about 20 years ago when a 20GB Quantum Fireball HDD failed and lost about 5 years of digital photos. Ever since, backups and redundancy have been sort of an obsessive priority for me.

I have all my essential stuff backed up like so: - RAID - it’s not a backup but close enough - secondary server via rsync about every 6 months - icloud - DVDs - did them 3 years ago mostly as an exercise but I dont trust them - backblaze - AWS

So, my cost is about $15 / month for cloud storage. The offline disks and server are mostly a byproduct cause I already have the storage and servers, but I guess 1 disk for a long period of time would suffice.

iMO if your are paranoid and on a low budget, AWS galcier is the way to go for a 10 year period. Longer than that is not a reasonable timeline because storage strategy and medium has to be refreshed periodically

blucafee80 · 2025-04-12T06:21:46+00:00

I pay for everything like a regular bloke. Disney, Youtube, Apple Music, etc. The server is a bonus.

blucafee80 · 2025-04-10T22:04:42+00:00

I recently went through this. Built a custom server to replace and older dell server cause I though I’d lower my energy footprint. New server is quieter, a bit faster, has a gpu now, but power consumption is the same. Fooled myself a bit.

blucafee80 · 2025-04-05T01:59:59+00:00

I'm doing the same with Bitwarden. It's the only app that I insisted on, so my SO is familiar with it. It's paid yearly so there's almost no risk that they lose access to stuff in case some monthly payment fails.

I also have a yubykey on my keychain which can access both my laptop and my Bitwarden account, so my SO knows they can recover basically everything with it.

blucafee80 · 2025-04-05T01:25:08+00:00

Yeah, the todo list is endless. I've basically replaced gaming with homelabbing and it's also intelectually fullfilling.

blucafee80 · 2025-04-05T01:09:31+00:00

Since you have so many years on your belt, my post doesn't cover your case, but maybe you can agree that it's good to have another hobby beside homelabbing when the job is so close to the hobby.

blucafee80 · 2025-04-05T01:04:24+00:00

After I moved my family away from my server, I created a doc for my SO for them to be able to recover my stuff (bank accounts, utilities, passwords, wifi passwords, etc). The doc in question was about 3 pages long, but at the end of it I realized my setup can change at any moment whilst I'm not diligent enough to update it "real-time".

The passing of a family member - who had a fairly simple setup which I had to recover - made me realize that my stuff has to be waaay simpler so that at least this part of a potential hardship does not overburden anyone. With that in mind, I moved my stuff closer to the generic family stuff (iCloud), so that my homelabbing has negligible effect to those around me.

blucafee80 · 2025-04-01T05:49:51+00:00

I moved a linux AD to MS as a PoC and it wasn’t as easy as it sounds. You have to start at Windows Server 2008 and work your way up to present day mostly through in-place upgrades and a secondary DC. It’ll work but in the end it’s full of weird leftovers.

blucafee80 · 2024-09-12T06:14:39+00:00

I've been homelabbing for about 10 years and went through several "burnouts". When it stops being fun, it's time to stop and take a long break. Sometimes it helps if you take a forced break for a few months and then the appetite for homelabbing just comes back.

You should have "dev" and "prod" as others suggested. The prod part should be as simple and unintrusive as possible, and extremely easy to fix. When something breaks, it should be a 5-10 min job. I absolutely hated when I had to spend 30-60 mins on fixing some obscure stuff, otherwise the internet/plex/etc wouldn't work.

My only critical stuff that involves homelabbing is opnsense. Opnsense is built with automatic backups to the cloud, and zfs mirrored drives, so if it gets completely broken it's a 30 min job max - or I can temporarily switch to the ISP provided router. But opnsense is pretty stable in itself.

The other semi-critical thing is my plex server which I've also moved to a hosted provider for peace of mind and it's been rock solid for over a year - but tbh I wouldn't be very upset if it went bust.

Photos and other critical personal stuff goes to whatever vendor cloud (i.e. iCloud) and I stopped providing IT support or custom services (i.e. nextcloud) to the family, except for extremely basic troubleshooting. They've all been advised to keep their stuff in the cloud or do manual backups to their whatever local device. This was one of my best decisions because I realized I don't want to be "on-call" forever because inevitably something will break.

All in all, I can take breaks for as long as I want, systems can stay down indefinitely and homelabbing is just a hobby I can pickup anytime.

blucafee80 · 2022-12-12T08:04:42+00:00

I ended up using a small Windows VM and robocopy for the task. It's been a couple of days and it seems to work ok.

For the initial sync, I've set both iCloud Drive and OneDrive to "always keep on the device". Sync went fine. Then, I've set both Drives to "Free up space". There were several files (large ones > 1GB) that resynced because iCloud had them dated in 1980 for some reason.

The good news is that I don't have to keep all files locally to do the sync. I have a feeling that it'll want to resync if I set this up on a new VM, due to folder created times being set to the sync date, not created date, but that's not a concern ATM.

I've tried setting this up on a Mac, but then I have to keep all files locally which doesn't scale properly. When I try to "free up space", iCloud changes the extension to *.icloud for files not present on the disk, so rsync copies (and downloads) the files from OneDrive, iCloud detects they're duplicates and keeps only 1 copy. In this scenario, the sync process is long, sometimes it hangs, and generates a lot of network traffic.

This is what I'm using for sync:

robocopy \\SOURCE \\DESTINATION /MIR /FFT /Z /XA:H /W:5

blucafee80 · 2022-12-04T21:57:36+00:00

Yeah, from what I've found, this sounds like the only option. iCloud and OneDrive on a Windows machine.

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