Matt BirchlerOh man, this guy tried to school me on how as Raspberry Pi would be so much better for my needs than a Mac Mini.
I appreciate the feedback, but truly, "you could have done this with Linux" replies always make me laugh.
Nathan Snelgrove@matt what video is this a comment on? Because if it’s about remote backups, I’m torn between Synology and a Mac Mini setup I have now that is kind of eh. Would love to watch if that’s what you’re covering here
@nathansnelgrove It was this video https://youtu.be/ek-7aTRmhvE, which does focus on things one could do on other hardware, but the Mini has been working absolutely great for me. Being able remote desktop into it and run the Mac apps I want has been enough on its own to elevate it for me.
I replaced my terrible NAS with an the cheapest Mac mini
@matt I will give this a watch! My experience thus far with the Mac Mini (been running it for two weeks) is that I want more storage attached, and I don’t need a whole Mac sitting there (especially one way less powerful than my M1 Max). It’s also been buggy in weird ways.
By the time I get all the storage I want, I’m almost at high end Synology pricing, so considering that direction regardless.
@nathansnelgrove Yeah I get that. For me I already owned all the drives so the Mini was the only new cost, which was way less than the Synology would have run me.
I'm also banking on an M2 being more than enough power today, but also enough to make me not grumble about it being slow and needed to think about an upgrade in a year or two.
@matt that’s fair! I bought the M1 Mac Mini, and I would need 3 8tb external drives, one of which needs to be plugged in to my laptop sometimes because it’s archival. So about $1200 (CAD). For $300 more, I could get the whole Synology thing with 20tb and a RAID5 system. It’s tempting.
(Plus, then I’d have a place to store the 4K77, 4K80, and 4K83 Star Wars projects and stream them from Plex. Which is my only use for Plex lol.)
It’s nice to have all these options though!
@matt I’ll also just add I’m not trying to debate you, and I’m sorry if it comes off that way! I just don’t know what’s right for me. Eager to see your video as soon as I have more time.
@nathansnelgrove Definiyely not! You’re describing your experience and what you think is the best thing for you, I love it!
The dude in the comments was more like “you did a stupid thing and here’s what a rational person would have done” 😂
@matt that dude is a douche. I did just finish the video, and I think what you’re doing is clever. I need a cold archive thing for work and I need photo backup and archival, so given how much storage it’s going to take, I might spring for the Synology. But I don’t know. I’ve been stuck on this for weeks.
@matt one big advantage to the Synology for me is that it does it all automatically. Right now I do a lot of hard drive cloning, even to the drive attached to the Mac Mini. It’s a lot of room for human error and laziness.
@nathansnelgrove That’s very true. My super power is not caring about redundancy.
It is also my weakness 😂
@matt I had a Raid 10 enclosure fry in such a way that every drive in it died while I was on holiday. The enclosure and the drives were all landfill. Lost 5 years of backups, including almost my whole wedding photography career. I’ve been insane about redundancy ever since.
@nathansnelgrove Woof, that sounds terrible, I totally get the paranoia!
For me, (basically) everything on my drives is also in the cloud somewhere, so that’s good enough for me, but my mental math might be different if I’d experienced a failure remotely close to that 😬
@matt I’m also paranoid about cloud software, just because I think I’ll outlive it. Having more redundancy gives me time to migrate to a new solution if, say, Backblaze becomes unaffordable or goes under. But I hear you! I’ve been living your life for a year with laptops, and if *stresses me out*