I started working out six months ago, and today I reached my 69th session. I’m currently cutting because I want to get leaner. My progress is slow, but I’m definitely moving forward, and losing weight too.

It’s incredibly important to track the weights I lift; otherwise, I’d have no idea whether I’m making progress. It’s not always steady, I go back and forth with my working weights since there are good and bad days. As long as I record everything and see overall improvement, I think that’s perfectly fine.

I do wonder if I could lift more, and progress faster, if I weren’t cutting. I eat about 1-1.2 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight, following a vegan diet, which means lots of tofu and seitan.

I focus on the big compound lifts and add isolation work whenever I feel like it. Sometimes I do certain exercises, sometimes I skip them. it’s roughly a full-body workout with a touch of fuckarounditis.

Today, I confidently pressed 8×27.5 kg, 8×32.5 kg, and 8×32.5 kg per dumbbell on the incline bench, which made me really happy. My goal is to bench 100 kg within a year. Let’s see if I can make it happen!

I want a server running nextcloud, immich and others.

I have a N100 mini server with a 2TB external HDD. I want to secure the system against data loss. Hence, I want a backup and redundancy.

1. Most important question: How do I build everything? Is this a NAS? My naive approach is to buy 3 external HDDs and connect them to the N100 with a USB hub. I assume this is not "the right way" but to use/build a NAS. Do I have to build a separate NAS computer? When I lookup NAS buying, it is a computer with a case for 4 drives, excluding the drives and costs 400 bucks. I am confused because this is incredibly expensive compared to what I already have. What is the additional benefit compared to my setup? Am I cheap?

2. Regarding redundancy, is RAID still the way to go? At 2 TB, using RAID 5 with 3 drives sounds good. I'd have 4 TB of usable space, much more than I intend to use in the next years, and adding a drive increases the storage by 2 TB, effectively increasing space by 50%.

3. I have 4 TB usable space, but I won't reach 2 TB in the next one or two years. I'd use a 2 TB HDD for a local backup via borg. Once my hot storage needs to increase, I replace the backup drive with a larger one and use it to increase the RAID storage. Is one backup sufficient? Or should I keeping multiple versions of the data. Daily, weekly, monthly backups? What is your experience with it?

4. Another 2 TB HDD for an offsite backup, LUKS encrypted, backed up once a year (that's the goal for now).

Does that sound good?