How reliable/realistic is to use a laptop as a remote file backup server?

[lka1988@sh.itjust.works]

If the laptop has a way to limit charging to, say, 70% in order to not turn into a spicy pillow, it would be viable. I have an older HP Elitebook 8440p laptop running as a server of sorts in my cluster, but the battery is no longer capable of holding a charge at all because it's always plugged in. I might get a Thinkpad to replace it as there are modifications for those to limit the battery charge level.

[pipes@sh.itjust.works]

Depending on the laptop (or with any laptop + smart plug) you can set charging thresholds, both for starting and stopping the charge (lower and upper limits), this way it will do a few cycles instead of staying fixed to a certain level of charge.

In order the worst things we can do to batteries are: leave them at 0% for years, leave them at 100% for years, leave them halfway for years (what happens when left plugged in with only an upper charge limit like 80%) - batteries need to do a few partial cycles at least, once in a while.

[atzanteol@sh.itjust.works]

If the laptop has a way to limit charging to, say, 70% in order to not turn into a spicy pillow, it would be viable.

Firstly - I love the phrase "spicy pillow".

Secondly - It would probably depend on the laptop and its battery health. But also the OS can limit charging I believe? I haven't looked too far into how it works but I've got my laptop setup to only charge to 90% because I'm nearly always plugged in. I don't know if that relies on any hardware/firmware options though.

[atzanteol@sh.itjust.works]

battery of this machine is toast (holds up for half an hour or less)

Fair.

as someone mentioned in another comment: unattended laptops with batteries can be actually bad. Batteries on certain cases can leak and cause fires, so for me, if it can work without it great, otherwise I have to drop the idea

I'm not clear on how a UPS would be different in this regard. They both have high-capacity batteries that need monitoring. Unless the UPS is using a different chemistry?

[zedotelhado@lemmy.world]

From my experience in the past, ups are done to be constantly on, and as far as I know, usually they have failsafe mechanism in case something is not working as intended. Laptop batteries do not have such extensive protection from what I know. However, if an ups is getting old (around 5 years or so) is probably best to change the batteries (if the model allows it)

[chkmrk@programming.dev]

I have an old HP Omen laptop that I use as a sever, removed the battery because it started getting a bit spicy but other than that it runs just fine for multiple years now.

I use mine as an application server without much storage since it only has space for one nvme ssd and one 2.5" SATA drive.

If you are that far away make sure you have someone with basic Linux knowledge around there to restart it if necessary. And it sucks in LOTS of dust, so be prepared to clean it about once per year

[zedotelhado@lemmy.world]

My plan is to go there at least once a year, so that would work for me

[ikidd@lemmy.world]

I have actually had headless servers I've ran on a laptop decide to go to sleep with the lid, its an ACPI mode that even framebuffer can decide to respect. IIRC it's not hard to ensure it's disabled somewhere in /proc.

[isokiero@sopuli.xyz]

Laptops use lithium-ion batteries and (at least your Average Joe's and majority of commercial units too) UPS uses sealed Lead Acid. If lithium ion battery goes belly up it'll burn your house down. If lead acid battery does the same, at worst, it'll leak a bit of corrodive fluids to whatever it's on top of.

There's commercial size li-ion UPS's too, but they require quite a lot of hardware around them to be used safely. Search from youtube (or whatever you like) a cell phone battery explosion and then scale that up to a fridge-sized cell-phone. It's quite a bit of steel and concrete to contain that amount of energy. And the funny thing about li-ion fires is that lithium ions reacts quite violently with water and the battery contains all the chemicals to keep the fire going, oxygen included.

So, yeah, UPS is a whole another thing to manage than a laptop battery.

[atzanteol@sh.itjust.works]

Ahh, okay - it is a different chemistry. I wasn't sure - thanks!

[darkassassin07@lemmy.ca]

I did this with a regular rpi, one of it's io pins and a single npn transistor a while back.

Multimeter to check which power button pin on the mobo is + vs -. - to the rpi gnd, + to the transistor collector, gate to the io pin, drain to rpi gnd.

Whenever the io pin goes high (positive), the transistor shorts the mobo pins 'pressing' the power button.

Script pulls it high for 6 sec to ensure the mobo is fully off, then low for 2 sec, high for 2 sec, then low again.

This was for a system that kept locking up while I was away, so I needed a way to remotely hard-restart it.

[lka1988@sh.itjust.works]

tlp has more features available for Thinkpads, specifically, so there's that. I'm thinking more of a laptop form factor but built as a portable server, with the battery specifically designed to be a secondary power source (like a UPS) instead of the primary power source.

Of course something like that would be incredibly niche, so it makes sense that it's not really a thing.

[lka1988@sh.itjust.works]

LiPo batteries should be stored at 3.7V/cell. That's basically ~50% capacity (fully charged is ~4.2V/cell). I have several LiPo cells for my RC stuff, some nearing 10 years old, that are still perfectly usable because of this storage method.

[i_miss_daniel@lemmy.world]

A smart switch that turns off the power when the battery hits 80% and turns it on at 78%? Dunno if that would actually work.

[atzanteol@sh.itjust.works]

Yeah I figure it's the sort of thing that requires some firmware support at least.

One thing I've always liked about using laptops as servers more than the battery has been the built-in display and keyboard.

[shimitar@downonthestreet.eu]

I did this for years.

[_cryptagion@lemmy.dbzer0.com]

The only thing you need to worry about is turning on battery conservation to protect the battery, or removing the battery entirely if your laptop doesn’t support that. Because if you have it plugged in and the battery is at 100% all the time, it’s going to go bad quickly. Bad batteries can sometimes swell up, which could turn into a fire hazard.

[lka1988@sh.itjust.works]

That's actually a thing some people do, usually with IFTTT or Home Assistant.

[lka1988@sh.itjust.works]

Good point, those are nice to have. Most of my cluster has vPro capabilities, so I can just log in remotely regardless of the OS's condition.