That sounds worth investigating, thanks! Amcrest needs an account for notifications afaik, but the Pro cameras can work just on a local network.

The app for them is awful. Then they made a new version that is awful in slightly different ways, so I’m interested in new options.

It mentions push notifications and emails, so I guess they must require an account, or can you configure them to use SMTP directly, as with the Amcrest Pro cameras?

I tested some more and can’t get it to work any more. I found a post saying it worked in 1.5.2 so maybe something broke in newer versions.

You need to enable Bluetooth as a method of connection in the app settings (and can turn off wifi and data there).

The phones can be in airplane mode but with Bluetooth turned back on (as you would to use earbuds).

I don’t recall pairing the phones, but there is a “connect via Bluetooth” option on each chat that might be doing that automatically.

You link accounts to each other by scanning qr codes.

It does have a group chat but I haven’t used it, so I don’t know if that works with Bluetooth alone.

I just tried testing this with an old phone of mine, but can’t get it to work right now (maybe because it has Graphene os?), but I have actually used it on flights in the past.

I’ve used it to message someone while on a flight.

I have it add a backup suffix based on the date. It moves changed and deleted files to another directory adding the date to the filename.

It can also do hard-link copied so that you can have multiple full directory trees to avoid all that duplication.

No file deltas or compression, but it does mean that you can access the backups directly.

I’m referring to Amcrest Pro cameras, btw. They are the ones that let you configure them to be independent of their cloud service, write to a NAS, etc.

I’m just testing out thingino, but it’s currently lacking features compared to amcrest.

There’s no option to only save video when events trigger, so it fills the card quickly.

And I can’t get the tinyCam app to access recorded files, so I have to use the web-based file browser.

But then Amcrest’s apps (both old and new) have do many faults and glitchy behavior.

Lots of features, but not simple and a big learning curve is you don’t already is emacs.

I don’t think that there’s a way for it to do drag and drop, either, although it’s emacs, so who knows?

There are some good comments in this discussion

https://lemmy.world/post/35820333

Rsync can rename/move target changed or gone from the source.

I use those options so that I get a separate ‘archive’ dir next to my backup target, with old versions of files.

It’s useful for loose collections such as photos.

I use rsync.net

It’s not the lowest price, but I like the flexibility of access.

For instance, I was able to run rclone on their servers to do a direct copy from OneDrive to rsync.net, 400Gb without having to go through my connection.

I can mount backups with sshfs if I want to, including the daily zfs snapshots.

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I like that I can interface with it in ways that I already understand (eg rclone, sync, sshfs).

Being able to run some commands on the server meant that I could use rclone to copy my AWS and OneDrive backups directly cloud-to-cloud.

Before even getting to documentation, I see so many projects that don’t have a short summary of what they do (and maybe what to not expect them to do).

As an example, Home Assistant. I can tell that it involves home automation, so can I replace Google Home with it? It seems like it doesn’t do voice recognition without add-ons and it can work with Google Assistant. Do I still need accounts with the providers of smart appliances, or can it control my bulbs directly?

None of that is very clear from the website.

I’ve seen plenty of other projects where it’s assumed there’s no need to explain it’s overall purpose.

I’m trying the fork now, thanks. So far, it’s behaving. Thanks for the pointer to the logs, I’ll take a look if it happens again.

Thanks. I’m giving that a try!

Good to know. If I can get it working reliably, it will be worth sticking with. Someone suggested it might just not be auto-starting on reboots. I’m trying the fork of the UI on f-droid to see if it helps.

I have the phones connected, but the app just decides to disconnect and stay that way until I check it. I’ll give that fork a try, thanks!

I could live with a few minutes, but it’s showig as offline for days. Maybe it is failing after a reboot. At least that would be a known situation to watch for.