No one but me on the homelab network. Ain’t nobody got time fo’ dat’. I’m a chaos engineer at work and I’m certainly not troubleshooting or maintaining ANY documentation at home.
I have no illusions that my wife has the technical skills to do it right (patches, updates, etc), nor does she have the faintest interest in it, so I’ve designed our stuff with that in mind.
I have focused on data preservation instead of service preservation.
- We have a shared photo library in the cloud, where everybody can access the same photos. She can simply start paying for storage and keep on rocking. Yes, it takes up twice as much storage in backups, but it’s so much easier.
- Documents are also in the cloud or in paper form. Important stuff is stored in government databases, which she can request when she has a death certificate.
Everything hosted at home she can simply turn off, or let it run its course until it stops working. The whole rack, including network and cameras draws around 70W, so not a fortune. If the WiFi breaks, she knows how to turn it off/on again, and otherwise she should just get something easier.
Backups are being made at home as well as to the cloud, using credentials known to each user, but both will most likely stop working eventually, cloud backup within a year. She will have to find a different solution for backups.
Sadly the sheer size of our photo library (3+TB) does not lend itself easily to client based backups, so instead we have a server that mirrors data locally in real time, which then handles backups for each user, but she has no idea how to operate this, or how to restore from it, which i recognize is a problem. As a “temporary” solution i have added the backup repositories to the backup software on her computer, but inactive, so that she can access them from her laptop.
I have made yearly Blu-ray M-disc archives of our photo library, and she knows they exist, and both locations that they exist in, so if the backups vanish, she will have photos up maximum a year after my death. Along with the Blu-ray’s i also keep a set of identical external hard drives that contains a complete snapshot of our photo library from when the discs were last created.