Eskating cyclist, gamer and enjoyer of anime. Probably an artist. Also I code sometimes, pretty much just to mod titanfall 2 tho.

Introverted, yet I enjoy discussion to a fault.

  • 55 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • The main advantages of Kopia, are speed and destination flexibility.

    The off-site storage does not need to have Kopia installed. It can be a mounted network location, an FTP server. Whatever. A generic cloud storage bucket like Backblaze B2.

    That’s why just a router with and external drive hooked up is able to suffice.

    For all of these, you can connect multiple Kopia instances to that same destination, and each client can browse backups, restore from them, and backup their own files to the destination. It even performs file deduplication across different source device. All while that destination device or service, has no access to your encrypted files.

    With borg, you need something like a Pi that can have borg installed. (You can also do this with Kopia, in which case the Kopia instance on the destination device is also able to manage the backups).

    Kopia also beats borg and restic in speed. My daily backups typically complete within a minute or two. I used to use Duplicati, with which it was common for it to take up to an hour. When it started regularly taking more than an hour, I switched to Kopia.

    Kopia is not the fastest for initial backup. The speed of this varies depending on destination type. It does not compress by default, but you can enable almost any type of compression you want. No, what it is fastest at is updating backups. If there is nothing to update, it does not take forever for it to figure that out. Kopia does it in seconds.









    1. There is no “special” benefit to a pre-built NAS. They have convenient software but there is nothing exceptional about them. They’re just computers with storage drive slots. Using a bunch of external drives via a USB hub would be fine. But is that your only expansion option on the system you have? Access speeds via USB, especially if using a hub, won’t be ideal. It’ll certainly work, though. You can also get enclosures to put full size HDDs in, which can connect to an existing system.

    2. RAID is still the way to go, but since you don’t need much storage, I’d start with RAID 1, not 5. 5 will require a rebuild with a new drive if something goes wrong, while RAID 1 will work with 2 drives and give you complete mirroring. Since you intend to have a “local” backup copy anyway, why not just skip that and use RAID 1? It’s literally the same thing, except it’ll actually provide uptime in case of failure, unlike a backup drive or raid 5.

    3. So RAID 5 plus a local backup, plus another offsite? This is overkill IMO. (Not the offsite backup that’s good. But raid+local copy. Just use two drives and mirror them using whatever you prefer.) In your place, I think I’d go with BTRFS in raid1c2 mode. This is like raid1, in that with two drives, you only get the capacity of one drive. But, the “c2” means that each data block is mirrored to two drives. With more than two drives, you can expand storage. (With three 2TB drives you’d get 3TB) You don’t get as much available storage as with raid5, but you get expandability, which you normally don’t with raid1. And you get uptime in case of failure without an array rebuild (though for this you must mount the volume with the “degraded” option, unlike actual raid using mdadm). You also get filesystem snapshots.

    4. You intend to do this manually? That is fine. My current solution is a second NAS at my dad’s home, to which my system is backed up daily using Kopia. Kopia deduplicates and compresses the backups, efficiently keeping versions up to two years back. The simplest version of this would be a router that can host an FTP server using an external drive in its usb port. This way you could automate off-site backup and have it happen more frequently. Asus routers can do this, and even come with free dynamic DNS and automatic https with letsenrypt. You literally just plug it into WAN somewhere, and you’ll be able to back up to it over the internet.


    Finally, just some mentions.

    MDADM, is what you’d use to create a software RAID array.

    BTRFS has built-in multi-device storage, of which only single, raid0, and raid1 are stable. Do not use the raid5 and 6 modes. While named raid, the modes differ from actual raid. BTRFS is able to convert from one mode to another, and can add drives in any mode (though will need to “balance” the drives after changes, to make additional capacity available). It is also able to evict drives. It will not auto-mount a volume after drive failure, and requires the “degraded” option be added.

    Mergerfs can be used to merge filesystems to expand storage non-destructively. It is able to arbitrarily combine volumes of any type, to combine their capacity. This way, it can for example be used to expand a raid1 array by combining it with a single disk, or another raid1 array, or whatever else. This can be done temporarily, as the combined volume can also be disassembled non-destructively, with each file simply remaining on whatever drive they were on.







  • Should be. I have it under “sort by>image>date photographed”. Important to note that is not always a populated metadata tag.

    You might not need to entirely switch, you can install just Dolphin (the KDE filebrowser) and use it with Cinnamon just fine.

    Edit: Nemo, the file browser shipped with Cinnamon, should also have support for this. I don’t personally use it so I can’t help you further there on how to do that or what might be wrong if it isn’t working.


  • I’m not saying it wasn’t.

    I’m saying the problem wasn’t “all audio being upscaled”. That’s nonsense.

    Something obviously went wrong. It just can’t be what you think it was.

    What you tried should be completely possible and not come with any significant difference in CPU usage.

    Which means you ran into a bug. Not some inherent difference in how linux works that means what you attempted is impossible.

    The “cause” you describe (audio resampling to match the samplerate being used), is how all digital audio has worked on all devices since the inception of digital sound. It’s not something stupid that only linux/pipewire does.


  • Still haven’t figured out how to sort pictures in a folder by date taken, but I’m gonna take a wild guess that’ll need the terminal…

    It wont. File sort would be a feature and or setting of your file browser. How to use it would depend on your particular file browser.

    In KDE dolphin though it would be under “right click>sort by” or “hamburger menu>sort by”.

    If you want this to be set separately for each folder, you’d open Dolphin settings (again, the menu, or the shortcut ctrl+shift+,) go to the view tab and set display style to "remember for each folder).


  • Well having my cpu maxed out by this simple change was my experience and that’s with a 7800x3d.

    I promise you. It was something else. Audio resampling simply cannot max out a modern CPU, and is something your system does regardless of what samplerate you are using.

    That’s it. I don’t want to learn about PCM mixing sound channels or upsampling or latency. I want it to fucking work.

    That’s fine. But then don’t make claims about how it works and why it has problems. Just say you had problems.