While reading many of the blogs and posts here about self hosting, I notice that self hosters spend a lot of time searching for and migrating between VPS or backup hosting. Being a cheapskate, I have a raspberry pi with a large disk attached and leave it at a relative’s house. I’ll rsync my backup drive to it nightly. The problem is when something happens, I have to walk them through a reboot or do troubleshooting over the phone or worse, wait until a holiday when we all meet.
What would a solution look like for a bunch of random tech nerds who happen to live near each other to cross host each other’s offsite backups? How would you secure it, support it or make it resilient to bad actors? Do you think it could work? What are the drawbacks?
A lot of technical aspects here, but IMHO the biggest drawback is liability. Do you offer free storage connected to internet to a group of “random tech nerds”. Do you trust all of them to use it properly? Are you really sure that none of them will store and distribute illegal stuff with it? Do you know them in person so you can forward the police to them in case they came knocking at your door?
Perhaps I’ve been naieve.