Funny sidefact as Dutch tourists are the ones most keen on the Black Forest cake: No matter who you believe invented the black Forest cake(either a baker in Bonn or a bakery in. Brandenburg):
It’s always closer to the Netherlands than to the actual black forest.
Gnhihihi.
Living in the Black Forest is sometimes fun.
First of all people admire the “mountains”. While yes, the Black Forest is not quite flat and especially in winter it is often underestimated (we have avalanches and occasionally people die in them) it’s not like they are that step and high. At least from my perspective - I grew up in the actual alps. It would be totally different If I grew up in the Netherlands. (And again: The nature is nice and we have wild wolves, Lynx and s few other rare animals here)
The other thing people totally get excited about is “Black forest cake”. But… It has nothing to do with the Forest… it’s just a reference to its looks and was invented hundreds of kilometres away. While you can get a decent one here by now, it’s still funny.
So…what is the most original thing you can get here? It’s the thing the tourists think that they are all produced overseas. The cuckoo clock. Not kidding, while a shitload of them are cheap china trash, you can actually get nice ones for a reasonable price that were still built here. (And some really really nice ones that look modern and stylish as well. I need one of those one day,but they are ridiculously expensive)
Other than that: Old buildings. My last apartment had some walls that were built at a time Australia wasn’t discovered by Europeans yet. My kids friend lives in a house that is 800 years old - and always belonged to the same family. The hill the local kids go tobogganing in winter very likely was already used in that capacity 2500 years ago as some archeological sites have shown.
Even my current house is 80 years old and that sometimes sounds absolutely ridiculous to friends overseas.
Syncthing and nextcloud are not a good backup solution. Like ever. Potentially they aren’t even a backup solution at all. Or even cause data loss.
You sadly didn’t tell us too much about what you are actually trying to backup and how your infrastructure looks like.
If I understand you correctly you want to centralise the files that are currently hosted on a diverse set of devices into a central file storage on your server and backup from there. Right? That’s a fair goal and something I absolutely do myself - and both NextCloud as well as syncthing will help you make the files accessible for devices.
Now,back to the backup part.
You want basically three things from backup: They need to reliable (doesn’t help when you can’t access your files anymore because they are corrupted), you want them to be as unaffected by any potential risks as possible and let’s face it,you probably want them cheap. The second part basically dictates that for an online backup you want something that can do versioning so corrupted data (e.g. from ransomware) is not simply written over.
My current approach is: I have an internal backup server (see below), an external backup in the cloud, and a cold storage backup in a bank safe. Sounds like a lot? We will see.
Let’s look at cloud storage first. There are a multitude of solutions available for free with Duplicati, urBackup or goMFT being some fairly popular ones - I personally use Duplicati. These periodically scan the folders for changes, encrypt the files and send them to a cloud provider of your choice (e.g. an S3 bucket.) and to some extent can also do the versioning. (Although it’s safer to regulate that via a bucket policy as otherwise the application needs delete rights - which means in theory could delete all the data when compromised). Main benefit is the ease of access - you need to restore a single file? Done fast and easy. Not so much for a whole setup, restoring things can get quite expensive.
If you use ZFS there is also the option to use ZFS sent to backup, but as there is currently no reliable European Union ZFS sent provider I am aware of (rsync.net does this,but is US based) legally cannot use them. So no experience on that.
To backup clients completly and VMs/LXC it might also make sense to use a designated backup server,e.g. the proxmox backup server. These do require local (as in “where the PBS is running” storage, though, so a local PBS and a cloud storage behind doesn’t work. (There is a “hosted PBS” Service available, though from Tuxis. They work really well). But it can make sense to let a zimablade run a few old hard drives for a few hours a day for that.
For offsite and online backup - as a full restore is always expensive and time consuming from the cloud- I also use two USB hard drives. One is always stored in a locker in a bank vault and every few months I change drive - so in case of a full server loss I only would need to restore the state of a (at max) 4 month old server via USB and then update stuff from the cloud for the 4 months after that.
Now, to be extra sure I also burn the most important files (documents about the house,insurances,degrees,financial and tax data, healthcare records, photos of lifetime events, e.g. weddings, birthdays,births, graduations as well as “emergency data restore howtos”, password files, basically all the stuff I want to make sure my heirs/kids have access to if I die) on blue archive (important, not normal disks!) M-Discs. They are supposed to last far longer than normal blue rays and most consumer accessible media. These are stored locally,in the safe and at the court that holds our will. The reasons for that? Powered off hard drives lose data quite fast and if the wife and I perish at the same time, eg. because we have a car crash or the house burns down the issue is time: Cloud backup might not be available anymore as our bank accounts are frozen and therefore the backup is no longer paid for. The bank safe is not accessible for a long time for the same reason. When someone then accesses the USV drive it might be of no use. The server might be powered off or damaged. And sadly the legal system here can take years (up to 7 years are my planning times) before they can actually access the data.
Person doing the hiring(formerly as a manager,now as an owner) here: At least in my legislation I literally can’t without facing a legal risk that is beyond worth taking. Which sucks big time.
In my last job where I was responsible for hiring people there was a strict “do not reply to people asking why if they ask you by mail and use one of these four sentences when they call you - or get fired” policy after people used these explanations to sue multiple times. The company won every time,but these kind of lawsuits are fucking expensive and time consuming.
And there are a shitton of people trying to gain a reason to sue,sadly. I had people apply to jobs they didn’t even have the legal requirements to work in (think as in “Neurosurgeon needed!” and your untrained custodian applies) and they then tried to frame you that they weren’t hired because of a protected class attribute.
Tbh, I only circumvented that rule once, when a very young candidate for a prestigious trainee position got the best score in our assessment centre we ever had. Only to be bested by two other candidates a day later. And I only had two spots. So…I made sure they knew that and made them reapply for the next scheduled opening and “parked” them at a partner company in the meantime so they were cared for financially (allowed them to even make a little “extra” as the traineeship didn’t pay that well in the beginning).
It’s a totally fucked up situation where a few grifters ruin it for everybody and (and this is as bad) also give equal opportunity laws a reason. We need changes in legislation that allow giving people useful reasons why they weren’t hired without risking lawsuits.
That can easily be done by cell broadcasts (which can absolutely have different stages of priority nowadays), mass-SMS (every cellphone that first registers in an affected area gets a SMS, via designated disaster management apps, by placing handouts on peoples doors (you usually do that by identify people at risks e.g. homecare patients, then you go by high to low risk areas - depending on the search of the contamination) and last but not least a few trucks with loudspeakers (even regular cop cars do) do wonders.
What happens here if someone is not at home when called, is not an actual customer of the water company, etc.?
There are dozens of better ways than how this was handled in OPs case.
Source: I consult community and disaster response organisations on this stuff.