Now that we are on this subject anyway, I want to know if any of you have experience or thoughts on how to combine your /home with the /home of a central server in your network such as a NAS. Currently I just have 1 computer running Linux that I use as a desktop. I find the following issues in my current life: - it is troublesome to maintain the same (user-crafted) scripts on every machine I end up using (I would possibly need to use Git and then symlink to it or something) - same is true for .bashrc and .vimrc Maybe they are small things but it is annoying to me. If there is one thing I hate doing is to repeat the same configuration again. But now I also have access to a NAS that shares its /home. * I *could* keep all of my regular documents on there but the thing is not encrypted and if I do choose that it is going to be eCryptFS. * I know with a little tinkering you can get LUKS-encrypted file containers that get opened on login, but I'm not sure the NAS would support that * The nas exports its /home using Samba, but I could use NFS as well. Samba means all files have the same ownership (which is nice) but it also means they all have the same permissions (which may not be nice) --> especially concerning executable scripts. * Supposing I had a different computer here (which I do have; but it could also just be a laptop) placing common files (documents, private data) on the shared account (my NAS account) could become really pleasant. There are two issues: 1. Security 2. Safety The NAS doesn't support any encryption other than eCryptFS. If you sync towards the NAS with e.g. a sync script (rsync) or FreeFileSync, it would mean that the shared home would not be current at all times; this does decouple the system and allows your system to function even when the NAS is down. As said before you can basically have two models: 1. Local copy is prime, sync to NAS == backup on NAS 2. NAS copy is prime, create regular backups on data partition of local system. 1. Useful for laptop. NAS can create its own backups. Moving to a different system and having up to date files requires sync. If syncing was automatic background daemon, no need to worry ever probably. Regular backup tasks to tar archive easy to configure on NAS Changes on NAS itself also propagate to other systems. 2. Sync is not required but you have no local copy. For safety, your local system must make backups that have some history (keep multiple versions) NAS can make backups too, but backups are now spread around OR local system must sync the backups (now backups are synced instead of regular files). So it seems the first model creates and maintains a local copy but syncs to the NAS where backups are created and kept. The second model does not maintain local copies but instead seeks to redistribute backups of the data store. Have you any thoughts on this? This does not answer any question about OS/distribution-specific files and probably pertains only to the "shared data" that is going to be the same for any operating system. Such shared data however may also contain programming projects that need executable permissions on Linux. So you have three kinds: * completely agnostic * problematic with CRLF/LF line endings (Git handles this) * local installation specific files So it seems you have 3 ways of dealing with it: * collections of general documents are the same on all systems (might want to keep DOS line endings on them) * Git repositories need a local copy anyway (compilation speeds, etc.) * just don't share your real /home. For me this implies at least 3 different directories: * Media collections are on a shared "media" share on the NAS * Private data could be on a shared "home" share on the NAS * Projects require high IO performance and need their local copy. * Real /home is going to give trouble anyway, scripts and config files could be manually copied, as long as you have a central master copy somewhere. ** Never depend on application-specific data stores (program-specific databases) for the safety and longevity of your data This implies: * Just use Git or equivalent to manage the syncing of source trees * If you use Git on the NAS too, don't put it in /home of that NAS * If you do image/video work, you would probably use the same system for that (single system), either keep this data local or put backup copies in the shared home. * If you use Git, it uses the first model (sync to remote) Thoughts? -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org