I picked this little box up sort of on a whim, but I think it will fill my needs pretty well. I like the form-factor for my purposes.

I fired it up and tested it with Windows preinstalled and… yep, that’s enough of that. So, on to my use cases… I need it to primarily do two things:

A) Serve as a replacement for my traveling media box. Several times a year, I spend a week or more staying in a hotel room. I’m not crazy about streaming services and I have found hotel networks to be unreliable at best, so I like to have my media with me, just as I do at home. I had an ancient chromebox (running… some flavor - I’ve tried several) that I had upgraded the drive in. I load it up with whatever I’m watching and plug it into the hotel TV. Recently, it struggles with some of the files. I don’t know if it’s failing, or it’s simply not up to the task of running some of the higher res stuff, or what. In reality, it has earned its keep several times over, so I don’t feel bad about putting it out to pasture.

B) When at home, serve as a clone of my homelab server storage. My home server is a tank made out of recycled server parts and running OMV. It may not be the most efficient thing I could run, but it’s been ultra-reliable. I’d like to use the Beelink box to back up my important stuff and also my media library. Ideally, I could plug it in at home and have it wake up once a week or so and sync certain folders, perhaps setting it up somewhere fire-safe.

If this were your use case, how would you go about it? What would you run? I’m just knowledgeable enough to be dangerous, mostly to myself, so please don’t bury me too deeply in acronyms and jargon.

Thanks for the help.