I'm able to set it up so that my SO and I can view all the pictures taken by the other (mostly cute photos of our dog and kid, but makes it easier to share them with others when we don't have to worry about what device they're on), have it set to auto-backup, and routed through my VPS so it's available effectively worldwide.
The only issue that I run into is a recent one, which is hard drive space - I've got it on a NAS/RAID setup with backups sent to another NAS at my parents' place, but it's an expensive drive replacement in current market conditions.
Hardware was cheap a year ago. Whoever managed to build their boxes full of cheap RAM and HDDs, great, they did the right thing. It will be some time until such an opportunity presents itself again.
Whole thing cost around $500. Before that I was paying ~$35 a month for a Google workspace with 5TB of drive space. At one point in the past it was “unlimited” space for $15 a month. Figure the whole thing will pay for itself in the next couple of years.
Actually just finished the initial replication of my 10TB pool. I ran into a gnarly situation where zrepl blew away the initial snapshot on the source pool just after it finished syncing, and I ended up having to patch in a new fake “matching” snapshot. I had claude write up a post here, if you’ll excuse the completely AI generated “blog post”, it came up with a pretty good solution https://gist.github.com/evanpurkhiser/7663b7cabf82e6483d2d29...
Syncthing has the 'untrusted peer' feature, which I've only used once, accidentally, but I believe provides an elegant way of providing some disk for a friend while maintaining privacy of the content.
Have been doing this for 25 years.
If you have asymmetrical connections it's easiest to do the initial backup locally and then take your drive(s) to your friends house and then just sync/update.
Which is to say, hardware is cheap, software is open, and privacy is very hard to come by. Thus I've been thinking I'd like to not use cloud providers and just keep a duplicate system at a friends, and then of course return the favor. This adds a lot of privacy and quite a bit of redundancy. With the rise of wireguard (and tailscale I suppose), keeping things connected and private has never been easier.
I know that leaning on social relationships is never a hot trend in tech circles but is anyone else considering doing this? Anyone done it? I've never seen it talked about around here.