Exploring a few changes to how, and where, I host my own data, I revisited my backup strategy.

For years I’ve been using SpiderOak ONE and my main complain was the pricing slide. At 500GB backed up, I can’t be at the 400GB plan, so end up forking over US$150 a year for a 2TB plan.

I probably don’t need those 500GB, as I know from their UI that it once backed up some useless data like logs and save games. The tool did a great job on data de-duplication, only counting once for every copy of the same file across multiple devices.

Following up from the previous work gathering Temperature, I finally got around setting up some monitoring.

Thanks to the good write-ups by alfaexploit.com, namely Monitoring Jail Resources in FreeBSD with Prometheus and Prometheus/Grafana Monitoring System on FreeBSD.

There’s also a document by the FreeBSD Foundation, Monitoring and Trending with Prometheus, still reasonably up-to-date for a reader in 2024.

I’ve not really used Prometheus before, previously having worked on very old school Nagios-based systems, then push-based solutions like Graphite and Riemann, to finally very Enterprise-focused tools like NewRelic. It’s fair to say I wasn’t a big fan of pull-based solutions because, on the old days, they incurred a cost in keeping a central database up-to-date and there was always a new host that someone would forget to add to the configuration.

Summer is upon us, temperature is rising, and I’m curious how my little server cabinet is faring.

A few years ago I bought an Elitech RC-4 Temperature Data logger for keeping an eye at the temperature at the office I used to work at.

It’s a pretty good device, you can leave it recording by itself, battery-backed, then read the data using the USB connector.

There’s even a Python elitech-datareader unofficial library, which did the job pretty nicely.