oranki

Portability is the key for me, because I tend to switch things around a lot. Containers generally isolate the persistent data from the runtime really well.

Docker is not the only, or even the best way IMO to run containers. If I was providing services for customers, I would definetly build most container images daily in some automated way. Well, I do it already for quite a few.

The mess is only a mess if you don’t really understand what you’re doing, same goes for traditional services.

Most likely, a Hetzner storage box is going to be so slow you will regret it. I would just bite the bullet and upgrade the storage on Contabo.

Storage in the cloud is expensive, there’s just no way around it.

There was a good blog post about the real cost of storage, but I can’t find it now.

The gist was that to store 1TB of data somewhat reliably, you probably need at least:

• mirrored main storage 2TB
• frequent/local backup space, also at least mirrored disks 2TB + more if using a versioned backup system
• remote / cold storage backup space about the same as the frequent backups

Which amounts to something like 6TB of disk for 1TB of actual data. In real life you’d probably use some other level of RAID, at least for larger amounts so it’s perhaps not as harsh, and compression can reduce the required backup space too.

I have around 130G of data in Nextcloud, and the off-site borg repo for it is about 180G. Then there’s local backups on a mirrored HDD, with the ZFS snapshots that are not yet pruned that’s maybe 200G of raw disk space. So 130G becomes 510G in my setup.

I have a feeling you are overthinking the Matrix key system.

• create account
• create password you store somewhere safe
• copy the key and store somewhere safe
• when signing on a new device, copy-paste the key

Basically it’s just another password, just one you probably can’t remember.

Most of the client apps support verifying a new session by scanning a QR code or by comparing emoji. The UX of these could be better (I can never find the emoji option on Element, but it’s there…). So if you have your phone signed in, just verify the sessions with that. And it’s not like most people sign in on new devices all the time.

I’d give Matrix a new look if I were you.