Classic power failure and raspberry pi with SD cards. When I last set up things for my parents, I simply imaged a bunch of SD cards and had the data stored on an external hard drive. I live in the US and they live in India and this is for their RaspBMC. With the SD cards they just swap a broken one with a new one and call it a day.

Been 12 years or so now. Went back to their home a few years ago and everything but the opensubtitles integration works. I was surprised. I could never recreate it now. Even has one of these flirc setups so the remote works.

India has unreliable power too so the SD card death was inevitable. I made a few more images and called it a day.

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bombcar 2 days ago | parent [-]

Abusing frontier AI to determine what the hell I did with ancient installs, and then modernizing it, as been quite useful.

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marcelox86 12 hours ago | parent [-]

This is why I'm looking into using Guix / Nix for when my home server dies and I need a replacement. Declarative setups make too much sense. The only form of history I have of the weird shit I did with a Mac mini running debian + a LaCiE HDD hub is my .bash_history file, which a chatbot was able to figure out for me.

	▲	arjie 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		My modern server infrastructure is managed in this style. Not declarative, but the manner of management is an idempotent bash script (terraform being the “heavyweight” version of this that I discarded).