My daily-driver is an Asus X515 laptop running Windows 11. I picked this up a few years back when it was on sale at a good price, knowing it was a little underpowered for my long-term needs. But it served the short-term purpose, and was great for travel. It came with a single 128gb NVME SSD and 4gb of RAM, which sounds pre-historic now but met my needs at the time. The system has a single NVME slot, and an empty spot for a 2.5" SATA hard drive or the equivalent SSD.

A couple of years ago I upgraded to a single 1tb SSD. This was partitioned as a 128gb C: and 840gb D: drive, although my reasoning for this is sketchy nowadays. Last week, I noticed that both the C: and D: drives were at 90%-plus of capacity, and there were no easy choices on what to move/delete to free up space.

Most of the heavy-lifting is now done with a Synology DS220+ system, which handles all the media and utility services. My personal files are handled by a Beestation, so the working files on my laptop are replicated there automatically, but these files have grown over time resulting in the over-use of the D: drive. The C: drive just fills up as Windows updates come in, new apps are installed - the usual creep.

Here’s the upgrade plan I came up with.

I found some good deals on the pre-Prime Days sale, so I ordered two new drives: a 1tb NVME SSD, and a 2tb 2.5" SSD. The NVME arrived first, so I mounted it in my USB enclosre, and used DiskGenius to do an OS Migration of the system partitions and the C: partition.

The next day, the 2tb 2.5" SATA SSD arrived early in the day, but the cable I needed to connect the drive inside the laptop wasn’t going to arrive until the early evening. I connected the drive to a SATA USB adapter I had in my e-junk box, and used DiskGenius to clone the existing D: drive.

When the cable came in, I installed the 2.5" drive in the bay, ran the flat cable to the connector on the motherboard, and used some of the adhesive pads that came in the cable package to hold everything down securely.

After you do this kind of work, the first power-on is always a test in humility, but thankfully the system booted right up without issues. The new C: drive shows a total of 930gb with 824gb free, and the new D: drive shows a total of 1.81tb with 1.08tb free. This should be plenty of headroom for a year or two at least.

I use Syncthing to synchronize files between various systems in my extended homelab. There are currently five systems using Syncthing - a primary NAS server and a backup NAS server based in Texas, a laptop running Ubuntu Server 24.04 currently based with me in Ireland (and known as the Blackrock server), my personal Asus laptop running Windows 11, and a Digital Ocean VPS running Ubuntu Server 24.04. (I have a couple of other devices in the Tailnet - my Pixel 6 phone, and the travel Chromecast.)*

Because of bandwidth and disk space concerns, not all systems sync all of the directories. The primary NAS has a single ‘media’ directory that has subdirectories for various categories - TV shows, Movies, Audio Books, Music, etc. The TV content is actually kept in three separate directories - tv for main content, tvextra for less visited, more niche content, and tvspecial for a couple of series that seem to cause Plex a lot of grief. The Blackrock system syncs most of these directories, but not all.

From time to time, a TV series is added to the main ’tv’ directory at first, but over time it gets reclassified as a ’tvextra’ series. Originally, I’d use Sonarr to move the series from ’tv’ to ’tvextra’, and since both of these directories are under the ‘media’ directory the move is made using hard links, making the move instantaneous.

However, this causes Syncthing on the Blackrock server to: a) delete the series directory from ’tv’; and b) recopy the series directory from the NAS to a new directory under ’tvextra’. In the end everything winds up where it should be, but at the cost of time and bandwidth.

The obvious soluttion to this is to: a) pause sync on the Blackrock server; b) manually move the affected series directories from ’tv’ to ’tvextra’ on both the NAS and the Blackrock server; and c) restart the sync. Both sides of the sync will spin while they figure things out, but after a minute or two they both report a full sync, with no need to copy anything from one server to the other.

* Note: I just added my Samsung Tab A9+ to the tailnet - handy when you’re out and about but the phone isn’t quite big enough to meet your needs. It now syncs the Obisidian vault and the KeePass database folder.

Before we came to Ireland for extended stays, I setup an old Dell laptop to be the media server while we travel. This system runs Ubuntu 24.04 Server with a GUI, and makes it possible for us to watch our ripped movies and related media. I use Tailscale to securely access my remote systems, and in the Tailnet this server has the uninspired hostname of dell4800.

I made a couple of updates today to make my day-to-day maintenance work more efficient.

First, I set up SSH on dell4800 with key-based authentication, and disabled password authentication. On my Windows 11 laptop, I generated a fresh set of SSH keys, and used ssh-copy-id to copy the .pub file to dell4800. I can now open a terminal session on dell4800 from my Windows laptop without a password. (The Tailnet provides ample security.)

Next, I installed and configured Samba, the Linux/Unix app that provides SMB/CIFS file sharing services. I added the dell4800 media directory as a share, and can now mount the directory on my Windows laptop.

dell4800 runs Syncthing in a Docker container managed by Portainer, and automatically syncs various folders from my main Synology DS220+ NAS system currently based in Texas over the Tailnet.

Nothing earth-shattering, but these tools make it easier and more efficient for me to do routine maintenance on the Syncthing target directories.