Are you looking for selective sync, and just over the LAN or over the internet too?

If just LAN, there’s many Windows sync tools for this with varying levels of complexity and capability. Even just a simple batch file with a copy command.

I’ll often just setup a Robocopy job for something that’s a regular sync.

If you open files over a network connection, they stay remote and remain remote when you save. Though this isn’t best practice (Windows and apps are known for having hiccups with remotely opened files).

Two other approaches:

1. ResilioSync enables selective sync. If you change a file you’ve synchronized locally, the changed file will sync back to the source.

2. Mesh network such as Wireguard, Tailscale, Hamachi. Each enables you to maintain an encrypted connection between your devices that the system sees as a LAN (with encryption). If you’re only using Windows, I’d recommend starting with Hamachi, it’s easier to get started. If mobile device support is needed, use Wireguard or Tailscale (Tailscale uses Wireguard, but easier to setup).

You forget your meds today?

Yea, glad I wasted 7 minutes on that nonsense, and glad I never applied at Google. If you’re saying I’m shrunk, we’re already in Imaginary World, so I’m gonna make stuff up too.

Anymore if I get asked stupid questions like this I say it’s not a good question, and to ask a real one. Interviewers aren’t used to such responses.

And I also don’t do STAR type interviews. When they start in on them, I tell them how useless they are, and pull out several sheets of printed questions and answers.

I don’t like current design trends on most cars. Not sure what it’s called, kind of Transformer-influenced.

And Lambo making an SUV is just dumb. Same with Porsche. Stay in your lanes, folks. Lol (I know I sound like an old man yelling “get off my lawn!”)

I had no idea this existed. Dammit, another toy I really didn’t need to add to my list!

He gave her An Itchy Urus?

I’ll see myself out.

“Italian Volkswagen” hahahaha, love it.

The only one I’d have is the Miura. If I’m gonna have a tractor supercar, at least make it the originator of the concept.

Very cool!

Whats the mill?

Hahahahahaha

Mama says humans ain’t no good to eat, but I gotta find out for myself!

Cloud can be surprisingly cost effective, as part of a 3-2-1 backup.

Check out storj.io

If it’s powered off, you’ll have no idea when it dies. And they do die just sitting there.

I’ve actually had more failures of drives sitting around than ones running constantly.

Tailscale is pretty easy, though I dislike the management console is via their servers/services.

Wireguard (which Tailscale uses) is fully self-hostable.

Just that you don’t need a beast of a machine (with it’s higher cost and power consumption) to just serve files at reasonable performance. If you want to stream video, you’ll need greater performance.

For example, my NAS is ten years old, runs on ARM, with maybe 2gigs of ram. It supposedly can host services and stream video. It can’t. But it’s power draw is about 4 watts at idle.

My newer (5 year old) small form factor desktop has a multi-core Intel cpu, true gigabit network card, a decent video card, with an idle draw of under 12 watts, and peaks at 200w when I’m converting video. It can easily stream videos.

My gaming desktop draws 200w at idle.

My SFF and gaming rig are both overkill for simple file sharing, and both cost 2x to 4x more than the NAS (bought the NAS and SFF second hand). But the NAS can’t really stream video.

Power draw is a massive factor these days, as these devices run 24/7.

RPi is great for it’s incredibly low power draw. The negative of RPi is you still need enclosure, and you’ll have drives that draw power attached to it. In my experience once I’ve built a NAS, RPi doesn’t draw significantly less than my SFF with the same drives installed, as it seems the drives are the greatest consumer. As I mentioned, my SFF with 1TB of storage draws 12 watts, and RPi will draw upwards of 8 watts on its own (my Pi Zero draws 2, but I’d never use it for a NAS). It’s all so close that for me the downside of RPi isn’t worth the difference in power.

Lol.

A cheesesteak without sautéed onions and mushrooms is sacrelege, and I don’t love mushrooms, didn’t like them for the longest time. It was probably the cheesesteak that got me to like them at all.

(BTW, you got my upvote, because I have a sense of humor!)

Wow, neat approach.

I don’t update unless I’m bored

Hahahaha, one of my kind!

My upgrades usually occur because I’m setting up a new system anyway, that way my effort is building for tomorrow in addition to the upgrades, and I get testing time to ensure changeover is pretty smooth.

As I said “how to reproduce this in a home setup”.

I’m running multiple machines, paid little for all of them, and they all run at pretty low power. I replicate stuff on a schedule, I and have a cloud backup I verify quarterly.

If OP is thinking about how to ensure uptime (however they define it) and prevent downtime due to upgrades, then looking at how Enterprise does things (the people who use research into this very subject performed by universities and organizations like Microsoft and Google), would be useful.

Nowhere did I tell OP to do things this way, and I’d thank you to not make strawmen of my words.

In the business world it’s pretty common to do staged or switchover upgrades: test new version in a lab environment, iron out the install/config details. Then upgrade a single production server and do a test with a small group of users. Or, build new servers with the new stuff, have a set of users run on it for a while, in this way you can always just move those users back to a known good server.

How do you do this at home? VMs for lots of stuff, or duplicate hardware for NAS type stuff (I’ve read of running TrueNAS in a VM).

To borrow from the preparedness community: if you have 1 you have none, if you have 2 you have 1. As an example, the business world often runs mission-critical systems in a redundant setup in regionally-different data centers, so a storm won’t take them down. The question is how to reproduce this idea in a home lab environment.

Also have a backup plan.