My plan is to go there at least once a year, so that would work for me

From my experience in the past, ups are done to be constantly on, and as far as I know, usually they have failsafe mechanism in case something is not working as intended. Laptop batteries do not have such extensive protection from what I know. However, if an ups is getting old (around 5 years or so) is probably best to change the batteries (if the model allows it)

That is true, however there are 2 things

• battery of this machine is toast (holds up for half an hour or less)
• as someone mentioned in another comment: unattended laptops with batteries can be actually bad. Batteries on certain cases can leak and cause fires, so for me, if it can work without it great, otherwise I have to drop the idea

I actually have contingencies for this. There is a ups around that I can use. It is good advice for sure, specifically for countries with fluctuations on the electric grid

I am planning after installing Ubuntu server and get some setup done, to actually sit it out and understand how much the fan is going and how I expect this to be an issue. Since my backups are probably going to be once in a week or so, I do not expect the laptop to have a lot of work (for now is just for file backup, no other services in there except tailscale)

At a later stage I will have to design a strategy to access and make sure is OK. Probably I am going to stick to tail scale and make sure no matter what both tailscale and ssh always start. Sure there can be issues but if minimal services can be guaranteed then it should mostly ok

You are not wrong with the vps. Although I am quite worried that my data stays with me no matter what. Not that I have state secrets or anything, but my stuff is my stuff. And to avoid issues with encryption and such, your own device most of the times is king

For sure not :D. I will be installing something such as ubuntu server, so I do not expect this issue (I don’t remember if the laptop has power saving via bios, but need to check)

Thanks for the pointer. Indeed I should probably see first the homelab communities as well

This is a good point actually. I will need to check the laptop can run without battery at all (back in the day I remember this was possible, nowadays I am not sure)

Never heard of pikvm, it actually looks like a very interesting solution.

From the previous point, what I mean by headless is basically to go the server, yank the GPU, press power button and it just boots.

I’ve tried several times, but bios straight up doesn’t let me go on. I’ve seen in a couple of places some mobos simply refuse to boot without a GPU.

I can see if I can have a decent value for the GPU. If not, I guess it’s doing its job as is. It just feels a waste to have this GPU be used as video for a server.

You are for sure right. I did find gaps on my solution right now which is:

• I have several external disks that only have the information once (some of then quite old).
• if I aggregate all of those in one spot I for sure need more space
• right now the ssds are grouped into a lvm to make a logical volume of 3TB (at the time this was OK since I was testing it out for a while). However, one disk fails and I have a problem on my hands.
• decided to look into ssd prices and my eyes started get watery at how expensive would it be (thus, coming to the realization regarding disk types. Didn’t mention before since my post was getting WAY too long).

Since I get this now, I am trying to understand better the landscape of solutions that can potentially fit.

Thanks for the reply. The breakdown is very good and I can actually see a lot of reasoning on your situation that I also would share (I do not have vast amounts of money to throw at this + only one drive failing and 2 handle the boat sounds about right).

As for the way to do the software raid, I’ve seen MD somewhere before but I honestly forgot. Since people tend to talk about unraid a lot. From my perspective, I would probably go as simple as possible, although I will be studying how effectively MD works.

Great reply :) learned a lot

This is something I still don’t fully understand because raid in itself has so many bizarre terms and configurations that for the initiated is just really hard to understand, unless you really take time to dive into it.

So my question is: when you tall about software raid, which configuration you mean? And also, how many drives are needed to do such configuration? Thanks in advance

Thanks for your insights. Yes you are for sure correct. There was a time I had friends of mine losing everything because of spinning drives. But then again, none of them were nas grade (and also, was a time having 128gb was an absolute luxury).

As for RAID, I was asking since it is something I hear people a lot doing. On my situation, my plan is to always have an external ssd with me plus a future remote like location for last ditch effort to save the data if really needed. So maybe it is OK for me to skip it. (And if I don’t have access to my photos for a week, no one dies)