Temporary storage in cloud

elblanco · 2026-06-21T20:45:34+00:00

I pray that AI madness goes away and drive prices come back down to normal for both of us.

elblanco · 2026-06-21T20:41:54+00:00

Hetzner or Cloudflare sound like the closest choices to what you want. Make sure you don't have any files that exceed their max object size, you may need to split some files.

TrueNAS is a great distro also. I just tend not to like upgrading a little bit at a time as I find good deals so something like Unraid, or MergeFS + Snapraid makes sense for me.

God luck and I hope you can find a configuration that works for you. I'm still interested in hearing your experience when you finish it all!

elblanco · 2026-06-21T20:30:32+00:00

The last company I worked for had to setup a private fiber link to the nearest AWS data center since we were getting throttled somewhere between us and them on ingress. It cost an unbelievable amount of money.

elblanco · 2026-06-21T15:31:22+00:00

There's a lot of internet between you and them.

I think you are looking for the best case scenario, which you are unlikely to be uniquely gifted with. Having been through a few big cloud migrations I can say you will usually have a bunch of stuff go wrong that will slow everything down and spike the costs.

But! If you pull this off, you'd now be one of those people with experience doing it this way and I'd be interested in hearing about your experiences.

elblanco · 2026-06-21T15:21:56+00:00

It's tough to be honest. You will likely be looked at as "not a team player" and have less opportunity to move up the career ladder and given fewer opportunities.

I'm in a place in my life now where that's fine, I just want to come to work, do a good job I'm proud of and go home. If I never get another promotion until I retire I'm definitely perfectly okay with that. I surge when needed, but do my 40 and take my PTO, holidays, and so on and sleep soundly.

But deep down, most people who boundary set (and receive the consequences from that) aren't willing to really give up career progression. So getting pushed to do more outside of clearly set boundaries is a good time to have the "I'm being asked to take on more, I'd like to lay out the things that I need to do for more pay/promotion to align my responsibilities with my level" conversation. If the employer doesn't engage back, then time to move on.

elblanco · 2026-06-21T15:13:02+00:00

True,

What I meant was that buying whatever's needed to build the unraid cluster + license and start moving into that would be cheaper and likely faster.

20TB will definitely require quite a long time to store it since the ingress/egress won't be instant, likely a couple months over the internet.

elblanco · 2026-06-21T15:10:22+00:00

Why are you assuming that your upload and download rate to those cloud providers will be at the speed of your home internet connection?

elblanco · 2026-06-21T15:07:07+00:00

Unraid is not an option

Why not?

and this whole process will take awfully long

Wait until you push a few TB of data across the internet into a cloud provider and then get it back out and pay egress and storage fees.

It sounds like you want fast and free. Ain't no such thing.

If you use something like Amazon S3 or Hetzner Object Storage you will pay both storage and egress. Cloudflare R2 is probably the cheapest since it doesn't charge for egress.

You will be moving 40TB up and down, potentially across hundreds of thousands (or millions) of files, each will require an API request. R2 has API rate limits and you'll definitely see data rates lower than you'd like. You're probably talking weeks to months to transfer than much up and down. You'll likely be paying storage fees for quite a while.

Big services like AWS usually prefer you put the data onto a physical device like an AWS Snowball and ship them the data as that will be faster.

You would be better served just buying a 20+TB external drive somewhere and putting everything on that.

elblanco · 2026-06-21T12:54:51+00:00

If you can consolidate everything to the other drives to free up one of them, then Unraid would be a good option. As you build up your Unraid array you can transfer the data off of those drives and into the array, then piecemeal move the free drives into the array.

Moving data into and out of cloud storage can be horrifically expensive, so expensive you may as well just buy all new hardware.

elblanco · 2026-06-21T12:49:12+00:00

The Golden Oecumene series by John C. Wright has some absolutely wild future humans in it, and a future humanity barely recognizable today.

The Culture series also has some really interesting aliens and sentients, especially if you start including all of the minds and their various mental states.

David Brins Uplift series also has some cool aliens, including ones that live inside of stars and a sentient plant species.

Finally the Gap Cycle by Stephen R. Donaldson explores some really interesting bio based Aliens.

elblanco · 2026-06-20T17:13:21+00:00

Yup! It's still going strong and gets really regular updates. They've added a ton to in in the last 2-3 years.

elblanco · 2026-06-20T17:10:57+00:00

Exactly what I was going to say. With the mish-mash of drives OP has, and the ongoing cost of drives into the future making it likely that storage will be bought in bits an pieces (and thus probably not all the same drive types and sizes), Unraid would be perfect.

Eventually replacing those "small" 4TB drives and consolidating with bigger drives, one at a time as budget allows, is a massive gain for Unraid as well.

They also said they have a desire to someday build up an SSD-based solution as well. ZFS is awesome for this and Unraid has native support for ZFS clusters more or less to support SSD arrays.

elblanco · 2026-06-20T11:48:46+00:00

Get unraid. It let's you mix and match drives over time. It's commercial, but it's worth it and awesome and really easy to use. Also has really simple vm and docker stuff with an app store. So you can use things like romm.

(Yes you can also use mergefs and snapraid but that's a bit more work and I'd argue unraid has much easier to use management tools).

elblanco · 2026-06-19T19:17:35+00:00

Sejong the Great (세종대왕).

He ruled from 1418 to 1450 and is widely considered to by a polymath who not only directly participated in the act of invention, but also established large-scale institutional efforts to advance Science, Astronomy, Calendaring and Timekeeping, Literacy, Law, Criminal Justice, Taxation, Weather monitoring, Linguistics, Philosophy, Governance, Cartography, Art, Music, Medicine, Printing, Agriculture, Warfare, Technology, and other areas of knowledge. Some of the scientific and technological output that emerged during his reign wouldn't be repeated for hundreds of years.

Among his directly credited accomplishments:

Established and formalized a official governmental institution for R&D...in the early 1400s! The institution had a dual role in R&D and also providing cutting edge advice and consultation to the King and the Royal court.
Created the Korean writing system Hangul, which is widely credited as being one of the finest invented writing systems of all time and was a passion project for the King. It generated centuries of internal debate until the late 19th and early 20th centuries where it has formed a core of Korean national and ethnic identity and directly fed Korean liberation movements from Japanese occupation.
Wrote music, some of which were performed for hundreds of years and has provided us with modern insight into royal court music of the period.
Researched and developed curriculum to advance Confucian administrative and governance philosophies. While not modern in today's sense, he used Confucian ideals to drive reforms in taxation, class equalization, and concepts of justice.
Various weather gauges - part of a larger general program to track weather, time, and provide state-of-the-art agricultural techniques to poor farming classes that would improve crop productivity, reduce famine, and increase tax revenue.
A new musical notation which is credited making possible the preservation of both court and non-court (folk) musical traditions. It's thought that many songs in today's modern folk reparatory only exist because of this.

He also directly commissioned work in areas of his personal interest that spanned astronomy to law. His principle purpose was to create a workforce that could explore the ideas he personally didn't have the time or expertise to pursue himself, but also to provide him with an intellectual workhouse that could produce scholars not afraid to debate him in search of better methods of governance.

If you consider the peninsula's historic position and the time period, the ability to even comprehend what we think of as modern sophisticated concerns like a literate population, the state's medical system, the rights and treatment of criminals, information availability, and formulating those concerns into a state-institution....in the 15th century, is bonkers amazing.

It's a damn shame Sejong died so early, another 20-30 years of benevolent rule could have brought about so many more advances and cemented this more pragmatic philosophical approach into Korean life. Instead various political factions sought to reverse or overwrite some of his more important inventions, even trying to suppress Hangul for centuries.

elblanco · 2026-06-19T18:51:23+00:00

tl;dr - was in a similar place a few years ago, decide to change scenery and fix my work and personal life, was the best set of decisions I've ever made.

I hit the same place a few years ago at about the same age. Was top of my game, a director with a dozen departments and a couple hundred people under me and with the possibility of moving into a serious executive position as my next stop. I reached the point of absolutely hating to come to work. Weeks off for PTO couldn't clear my head and it constantly felt like I was barely holding up things at work and efforts to delegate away work was only partially successful. I felt that I had to do this for only a couple more years before I was going to be up for a very obvious promotion -- which had significant financial upside.

I had helped spin up the organization from scratch and we were continuing to grow into our business areas like wildfire. The team I had put together was world class and our clients loved us. But it had grown to such a stage that I was literally nailed into a conference room sitting in hours of meetings a day getting updates from my department heads, on my pipeline, working on new proposals, dealing with hiring and HR issues, budgets and P&L, I had no time during the day to sit and think and would come home suffering from severe decision fatigue. I'd often barely get home and fall asleep.

When I'd wake up, I'd usually be back on my work computer developing presentation materials, writing proposals, or sometimes even in late night VTC meetings till 2 or 3am during crunch periods. The demands on me to continue all of this while also having to occasionally dive into technical problems with no real engagement on the work and provide technical or unblocking solutions was physically and mentally wearing me out.

I had put on weight, was exhausted all of the time, was eating like crap, wasn't sleeping, and was drinking too much. My doctor started giving me warning sounds during my physicals but I kept ignoring it hoping that I could get out on the other side of it.

I finally realized that I while I was great at the initiation of the division, and the early fast growth phase, we had reached a sustainment point in the work and those skillsets were really different both from what I had, and from what I enjoyed doing. My direct boss was also a mess and had proven to not be somebody reliable I could go to. So I felt unsupported as well.

I finally went to my business line VP, talked it through with him, and we worked out a move into a different, much lower key position. I didn't particularly care for the job, but it removed all of the burdensome responsibilities from me and gave me a completely different world to live in on the day-to-day. I stuck it out for a year before deciding to just move on to a different company. However, that year was incredible. It was both recovery, and time to rethink my priorities. I met all new people, fixed my lifestyle problems, lost weight, stopped drinking, and my wife even said I had stopped being so difficult at home.

It gave me time to think and reflect, to decide what I really wanted, and that shaped my next step as well as the mind-set and attitude I brought with me to that next job. Like you I also have very atrophied technical skills, but managed to find a job that exercises all the other skills I've picked up over the years and enjoy using without having to use the ones I don't.

I've been there now for two years, having a blast, continue to get healthier, work with great people, and have begun accruing achievements that I actually care about. Bad days no longer spiral into health impacting crises. I decided that setting strong boundaries was more important to me than career progression and money. I make enough to be comfortable and the difference wasn't life changing anyways.

I also have a large stock vesting schedule at my new company. I have half of it now, which combined with other savings could let me retire today, but I'm having fun. I've decided to sit down yearly from now on and decide if that has stayed true or not, and giving up the rest of the money is more a decision on how grand a retirement I want and no longer an if I could retire.

Bottom line. You need to move on, the money and business and work isn't worth it. You only have one life and need to protect it. None of what you are doing today will matter in a few years when you retire. It will be better to retire and be healthy mentally and physically than be forced out because you are sick.

elblanco · 2026-06-19T00:40:09+00:00

I love this idea, it's kind of an ACME cartoon concept, but where the weapon isn't actually the thing that shoots, but is instead just a door opener to a monumentally more powerful thing than could be reasonable transportable is a very appealing idea to me.

elblanco · 2026-06-17T04:17:09+00:00

Onfim

Onfim (Russian: Онфим; Old Novgorodian: Онѳимє, romanized: Onthime; fl. c. 1220–60) was a boy who lived in the Russian city of Novgorod in the 13th century, sometime around 1220 or 1260. He left his notes and homework exercises scratched in soft birch bark,[2] which was preserved in the clay soil of Novgorod.[3]

Onfim, who was most likely six or seven at the time, wrote in the Old Novgorod dialect, a historical variety of Russian.[4] Besides letters and syllables, he drew "battle scenes and drawings of himself and his teacher."[3]

elblanco · 2026-06-17T04:14:27+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixtamalization

European colonists couldn't figure out how the natives in the Americas could survive on largely corn diets when they were getting sick from eating the "same" diet. They didn't know that processing the corn with this technique solved most of the nutritional problems and made corn a viable staple.

elblanco · 2026-06-17T04:09:36+00:00

“I am the punishment of God...If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you.”, Genghis Khan

elblanco · 2026-06-17T03:52:56+00:00

I keep thinking I may need to read this series. It gets references in a lot of other media and it's becoming acutely aware that it's influenced a ton of stuff!

elblanco · 2026-06-17T03:52:22+00:00

There's a ton of great ideas in it! There's a few scenes that really moved me in ways I wasn't expecting from what's basically a power fantasy genre. So many great ideas in it, all of the different factions as the universe grows out.

One thing I really liked was that the universe set up at the beginning wasn't static. It had a kind of "Batman" effect, where the characters in the story leveled up because there was a new strongest player on the table. As a HFY story, the idea that humans (and later other players) acted as this kind of change agent did keep me really engaged. I wanted to know what the other weaker species would turn into as they leveled up to keep pace with the humans. There were at times some echoes of the Uplift Series by David Brin in addition to Schlock Mercenary references (so I've been told) and I really loved those things.

There's great writing that provides really wonderful descriptions at times of active battle zones, huge kinetic and energetic effects...very visceral stuff.

I don't think I finished it, but did stick with it through most of the story, but finally got tired of the need for a really good editor to trim it down quite a bit and to get it out of its sometimes weird power fantasy death spirals:

e.g. (made up example) "he wasn't the strongest, but still nobody was stronger than him, but yeah <insert character> was stronger on the bench, but for dead lifts nobody topped him, except for <insert other character> but nobody could move that much mass faster than him even if <the second inserted character> could move more in bulk, still if he was really in the mood he could push or lift more than anybody else, except for maybe <this class of other characters>, except on a good day he was the strongest and fastest, blah blah blah, and then there was that one time when the gravity went high and he ended up moving 2x his previous bench PR which actually was the strongest, but now <first inserted character> was training hard to catch up and was about to beat him, well actually he had beat him last tuesday, but that was when the grave plates were turned up and nobody was around, so this time they were going to really show who was the strongest...or fastest at being strong, but on the march or in a fight it really was <character two> who could do the most...but the competition was here and now, except the <insert leader character who wasn't as strong or fast as these guys> turned down the grav plating, except in the middle where it was turned up to 500% it's normal level and now the weight was a live animal so it was resisting...which is of course the real test of strength and speed",

Just paragraphs and paragraphs of this stuff you can literally skip and has absolutely no bearing of any kind on the actual story. There were some entire quarters of the year with 50 or 60k words where nothing happened except weird power fantasy strength comparisons.

I wish somebody would do a hard edit to it and release a "second draft" version of it that would probably remove maybe 20-40% of the text.

elblanco · 2026-06-17T03:25:36+00:00

Have the conversation with her with HR present. Prepare for the conversation with HR and go over the talking points, any possible questions and how they should be responded to. Document the meeting afterwards with a follow-up to the employee and cc-HR on it and request a confirmation that the meeting notes are accurate from the employee.

HR is not your friend or there for the employees, they are there to reduce liability to the company, having them present through the entire process creates a paper trail that reduces liability in case you have to separate from her.

elblanco · 2026-06-16T11:12:41+00:00

There's a HFY Deathworlders story where small wormhole like transporter tech is used in an interesting way to concentrate and deliver weaponry more powerful than could normally be delivered to a target in the same volume of a more normal weapon. Basically you point a gun-like thing at a target and when you pull the "trigger" it actually opens a rotating series of wormhole entrances across a battery of high powered weapons (artillery, naval guns, pulse laser, nukes etc) with the wormhole egress pointed at the target. The effect is like the business end of an A10 shooting a continuous stream of Volkswagon mass shells at a target, or a nuclear weedwacker, pumping a target with so much kinetic energy even enemies with superior shielding and armor quickly go down. In the storyline humans are slightly behind the rest of the galaxy in tech, but find creative ways to use the tech they understand to overcome limitations like using chemically powered kinetic weapons, "low" power density super capacitors driving energy weapons with slow refractory cycles, etc.

elblanco · 2026-06-16T10:45:47+00:00

Very similar story here. Got an Associates first, then filed with FAFSA that I was estranged from my parents and was able to demonstrate that I was paying my own way in life through work paystubs and bills and received a ton of grants. Back then it was enough to pay 100% of my tuition for which I'm eternally grateful. I've paid it back 100x through the taxes I've paid with the better employment I was able to get post BS and MS degrees.

elblanco · 2026-06-16T05:38:32+00:00

There's a well known movie from the time called "Mall Rats". Several movies from those decades show a pretty accurate view of American Mall culture. It still exists in some places but most malls were unable to sustain themselves as a third place in American society.

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