They removed the Battery Management System from the battery and wired it up to power as an alternative to soldering directly to the small phone board. Turns out this phone also needs usb charging at the same time because otherwise it assumes the battery is dying even if it’s not?

If anyone else is curious, they documented it here:

https://crackoverflow.com/docs/system_administration/containerization/turn_android_phone_to_batteryless_home_server/#why-go-batteryless

https://old.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1h7z9js/what_do_you_think_about_my_new_home_server/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7f8SliNGeDM

That works but there are times where a machine/service dies completely or hangs mid-process for a couple of days. You can account for a lot of those cases, but having a separate system that just looks for success rather than monitoring for failure works betters in my experience.

Or if you just want notifications, ntfy is really nice and selfhostable.

I’d recommend using a job monitoring service that will alerts you if it doesn’t get a check in. It’s very useful if your backups fail silently or hang mid-job for some reason.

I use https://healthchecks.io/ since it has a free tier and it works well.

Here are some features off the top of my head that some backups software might have that other don’t, or that you’ll want to consider when choosing or making a system:

• Application aware backups: E.G. DB Backups without shutting down the database. Could also be hypervisor/container awareness.
• Restore: The ability to automatically restore files, systems, possibly to a new location.
• Application aware restore/browsing: Being able to pull individual files from a backup, or accounts from a directory system
• Backup copy: Automatically copying the backup to multiple destinations, disk or S3.
• Retention: Automatically keeping a set number of backups, often including a number of weekly or monthly historical long term copies.
• Backup Diffs: Keeping backups in a way that you only store the data changed rather than a full copy.
• Compression: Compressing the stored data
• Immutability: Keeping backups in a way that allows a (usually cloud) storage provider to lock files for X amount of days to prevent malicious deletions
• Encryption: Encrypting your backups if they’re kept on someone else’s infrastructure or a non-secured area
• Verification: Checking that the backups are intact and not corrupt.
• Control panel: A single place to view the progress and completeness of all backups
• Alerts: Notifications for failed backups, or hooks for successful backups for healthchecks.
• Virus scans: Making sure a backups is malware-free before restore.
• Retries: Ability to retry backups or copies in case of temporary outages before sending alerts

I’m not sure which of these exist in free software, my experience is mostly on enterprise software. A backups system can be as simple as a rsync/zip cron job or a full integrated system depending on what you need.

I’ll second navidrome.

I’ve also added bonob to expose it to some sonos hardware I got for free. I’ve found it’s the easiest way to get custom music and streaming radio into sonos. Music Assistant buffers for some reason.

I’m having the same issues with exposing it. I have mine behind Caddy+caddy-security and it works well through the browser, but I haven’t found a native app that can handle that method. I think I’ll add it to tailscale eventually to work around that.