I have Nextcloud on my server which stores all those documents and photos etc. I have nightly offsite backup as well as backing up to a local borg repo on a separate drive.

But as it’s that important to me, I also do a once-yearly backup of non-encrypted files to M-Disc, with two copies, one stored at my mother’s house. This way if my house burns down and I’m inside it, my family can still get (most of) the precious memories without needing to know how to access a borg repo and without having to know how to download from Backblaze object storage.

I’m just a little bit paranoid about losing things after that one time I dragged from a USB stick to my computer and when it was done moving the files they were all corrupt, and didn’t exist on the USB stick anymore either. Thanks Windows, a whole holiday of photos gone.

I have about 750GB of irreplaceable files on my server so I want a really solid history. A couple of days backup is no where near enough to give me peace of mind 😅

Yes correct. I only saw the one video linked but this is it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHP942Livy0

Ah yeah makes sense if it’s not just for storing an offsite copy of backups like mine is.

Is using a VPS cost effective compared to uploading to object storage?

I use rclone to sync backups to Backblaze object storage. I find it hard to believe a VPS would be cheaper, considering the disk space on those can be very expensive compared to object storage.

I guess OPs question is more about what makes you comfortable.

Is your drive only big enough for 2 backups or is it big enough for hundreds? If it was half that size would you still be happy with the number of backups? A quarter of the size?

Back when I used OneDrive, it deleted an important but seldom used folder. It just wasn’t there anymore. No one noticed for 6 months, but luckily I had kept a backup each month so could restore it easily.

3 weeks is definitely not long enough for me to notice something missing, if it’s just a random chunk of my 700GB of important stuff. E.g. if a folder of my kids photos from 5 years ago suddenly disappeared, I probably wouldn’t notice it for months but would be devistated to find it missing when I eventually went looking for it.

fill the given soap cup all the way

One thing I’ve learnt from this thread is that this isn’t necessarily right. Its size allows for people with hard water, but if your water is soft then by filling it all rhe way you are likely using too much, which can lead to residue on your dishes. For soft water, half filling is apparently often plenty. Which is another reason to use powder not pods.

So does washing by hand 😆

That sounds like almost as much work as washing by hand!

Someone else posted a video that covered this. Some dishwashers (not mine) have a pre-wash spot for putting the soap. In the video, the guy had his spot actually on top of the soap door, so it would be measured but falls straight in with the dishes when you close the door for the pre-wash. He said in the video to just add a tablespoon of dishwashing powder on the door or in the bottom if yours doesn’t have a prewash spot.

I have learnt a lot from that video and all the comments here!

Watch the video someone else posted in this thread. It briefly touches on timed release pods. They tested and the whole thing disolves at once, within seconds.

By which I mean, I do quickly wash them by hand if there’s any obvious gunk, and no one would realistically tell me not to.

The whole point of this topic is that you’re not supposed to have to do that 😅

Nah, someone else posted a video that goes through it in detail. The pre-rinse is 10 mins (depending on dishwasher) of splashing plain water around and around to get the grubbiest bits off, then it dumps the prerinse water and gets clean water for the main cycle where the detergent goes in.

One of the key tips in the video was to add detergent in the prerinse detergent section (some open section that lets it go in straight away), or if your dishwasher doesn’t have one then just straight on the door or in the bottom. Just a small amount so the pre-rinse cycle has detergent in it so can get more off before the main cycle.

The only thing I’ve found about putting dishes in dirty is that some fancy dishwashers on the “auto” setting will sense how dirty the pre-rinse water is and set an appropriate wash cycle. If you’ve pre-rinsed, then it won’t find much and will put it on a light cycle. This can lead to dishes not being clean if they are actually really dirty but you rinsed off the loose stuff already. But it can be worked around by just setting the cycle instead of leaving it on auto.

The QI monkeys are just buzzing around on the net finding factoids for the show, you can often find untrue or misrepresented ones.

Did you ever try it? Or is kombutcha just what they wrote on the label?

If that were true, dishwashers wouldn’t start with a pre-rinse before the detergent goes in?

Yeah I got that from the video, just throw it in since it’s the first cycle anyway.

Unfortunately fediverse.observer went down about a day back. But there was a noticeable drop in Lemmy activity. From memory it went from 53k to 50k or something like that. Now you’re gonna ask “50k of what?”, well I don’t remember. Perhaps posts or comments.

I wanted to see per-instance but they didn’t seem to track daily stats per instance. And now it’s all gone 🙁

That was fantastic, thanks!

Some of the key things were to put separate powder in for the pre-wash (mine doesn’t have a separate pre-wash section as far as I can tell), and to not put so much detergent in. We have soft water, and apparently that means if you fill the thing up (or use a tablet/pod) then you might be using too much detergent which means it might not all come off in the final rinsing stage.

Just watched the video someone else posted. My machine doesn’t have a pre-wash section as far as I can tell, but I’ll throw some extra powder into the bottom for the pre-wash cycle and see how it goes.