afilipovski

Thanks for the input. These things never crossed my mind, even the first one which in hindsight should have been obvious to me. I will update the article to include these.

The ideal setup is rootless Podman and having all your containers not even be able to create root-owned files.

It would also be great if services did their own database dumps. Immich does this and it's such a relief to just be able to copy over its volume for backup purposes.

Unfortunately we don't live in an ideal world and so much of the software both doesn't dump it's own databases, and is incapable of running in a rootless container.

If you weigh the probability of a privesc from your backup with full access to the volumes, against the probability that the software you run has a CVE, which one is worse?

This is one of those things I consciously chose to ignore in my setup. Maybe it will come back to bite me in the future, sure. Or maybe I will learn a better approach that pushes my frontier of convenience-security forward.

> So who are we? A household with a localhost administrator?

In my case, yes. I've gotten into the trap of building a homelab that over time became pretty important, more like a small prod environment. We take for granted the "stability" that cloud services provide (until the terms of service change and you are screwed over by either loss of privacy, loss of access, etc). Self-hosting these things yourself exposes you to this complexity.

Photos aren't that important, how about your passwords and documents and the whole setup around all this?

I also do a part of this just for the love of the game.

Let's say SSDs have an annualized failure rate of 1%. (The real figures are from 0.5% for more reliable ones, 1.5% for less reliable ones). The annualized failure rate for HDDs is a bit higher, but let's give it 1% anyway.

Over 40 years (even with changing disks, upgrading PCs, etc.), the chances of you ending up with your data intact is 0.99^40=0.67. May not seem too bad, but this is just a hardware failure of your main drive we're talking about. When you factor in all the other types of screwups that happen, the annualized failure rate will skyrocket.

So a more conservative version of this quote is that a 20-year old today is very likely to experience data loss over his lifetime.

Thankfully with cloud being ubiquitous at least photos are given one copy in the cloud, but IMO even that is risky. People have different appetites for risk, and that's OK. But over the last 20 years the all of our data has become pretty important. I don't know how many people could stomach the loss of important documents, photos, etc.