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Can you be more specific?


The original post was about the perils of hosting your mails at home. I'm not clear what your answer is about.

For example, in a power outage, Helm won't work. You say it's not a problem with a charged battery and LTE. I think you're talking about a cell phone and I don't understand how that's related. Sure, one could run Helm on a UPS with LTE backup. But then that's extra infrastructure against the promised simplicity.

Also I don't see how encryption prevents the device from being physically destroyed.


> For example, in a power outage, Helm won't work.

I mean you can connect it to a Uninterupptible Power Supply "USP".

It's not clear if they have a high power USB connector to connect USB batteries, however:

"Built-in battery backup for safe shutdown

On mode: 10 W

Standby: 0.4 W"

(https://thehelm.com/pages/technology)

> LTE backup. But then that's extra infrastructure against

> the promised simplicity.

There are low-cost routers with USB ports that allow plugging in an LTE stick.

> Also I don't see how encryption prevents the device from

> being physically destroyed.

You can create a backup and store it on an untrusted storage (cloud for instance).

I'm surprised these devices didn't take off 5 years ago already, as this is technology wise almost a step backwards into the 90s. But I think it's worth it, and in fact you don't need helm to set up a system like this yourself. Get a Raspi, stuff an LTE stick and a juicy USB storage into it together with external USB-battery in passthrough and you even have a superior device.


You are introducing a lot of moving parts to go from 99% to 99.5% availability. And you can't get much better than this at home. In that vein, for most people, the availability of a Raspi solution would be 0%. They just can't handle it.

If you can accept the bad availability Helm looks like a fine solution to get your mail out of the cloud.




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