AUTHOR
Mikhaila Molina
Writes Cold Spare: measured results about home servers, backups, and the self-hosted software that runs on them.
Published here
- What backup compression actually buys a home server — 65 codec-and-corpus combinations measured on a 281 MB corpus assembled to match what a home server really stores.
- What SQLite's durability settings cost on a home server — 36 configurations, and the macOS flag that changes the answer by a factor of ninety.
Tools
- Backup window calculator — works out which compression setting fits a stated backup window, using the throughput figures measured here rather than vendor claims.
- Home radio protocol picker — a constraint solver over nine wireless standards that eliminates the ones which cannot meet a stated range, power, data-rate and node-count budget, and gives the reason for each elimination.
How these pages get written
Every number published under this byline comes out of a script that is published alongside it, run on a machine that is named on the page, against a corpus or workload that is described well enough to rebuild. Where a claim is not a measurement — a durability guarantee, a protocol limit, a regulatory constraint — it is cited to the primary document that defines it, not to a secondary summary.
Prose here is drafted with the help of a large language model working from those results and from the primary documentation, then checked and edited before publication. The about page sets that out in full, along with the funding position, the corrections policy, and the history of the domain this site runs on.
Corrections go to hello@iotlinefair.com and are applied to the page, with its revision date updated and the change stated.