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EDIT: Thank you all for your replies. I love the Lemmy community!
Here’s an idea of the backup flow that I think would fit neatly with our computer usage. There are stretches of time (week-long) where I don’t even wake the computer up.
syncthingsyncs stuff from our laptops onto theserver.deja-borg-restic-dup-or-whichever-encrypted-iterative-backup-solution-wins-my-heartthen proceeds to take “snapshots” of the data whichsyncthingdelivered to the server. One weekly and one monthly snapshot for each laptop.- The
serverproceeds to send the snapshots to an off-site server somewhere, a Back Blaze type deal where I might keep a couple of weeks and months worth in backups.
Something like that?
Both me and the wife live comfortably on 512GB SSD each so there is not a ton of data to be dealt with. Thing looking to be backed up are basically the XDG user directories á Desktop, Documents, Photos, Music et cetera…
My worries with the ARM SBCs are the specific disto images built for them. How long does support/maintenance last for one of these images? I know it depends on the distro. My worries are that as new iterations of a board is dropped onto the market the images for the older board get more and more neglected. Maybe that does not matter and the images basically just “drivers” which once implemented are good for years and years to come?
Dream would be something along the lines of an Odroid HC4 (OLED) with a Void Linux (it’s my jam) image running on an SSD along with a beefy 6TB HDD. Low cost, low electricity, redundant enough if off-site backups are implemented. Have the OLED display current updates available and status for syncthing and deja-borg-dup-kup-restic-blaze.
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TL;DR: What I want from this post is to hear and be inspired by how you go about backups and or other services and general home server thoughts. Hardware, software, family constellation, maintenance routines and other aspects related to your setup.
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I just realized I have not had any local backups of files and photos since 2015-16~ when I left the fruit-computer sphere and their Time Machine. Instead I’ve relied on Dropbox and more recently Mega for two-way file sync to act as a backup.
Difference between those days and now is that I have my own family with needs for proper backups and it has to be done via a local server solution/NAS. Furthermore, it makes little sense sending files to unknown servers using services like Dropbox and Mega.
Big time option-paralizys going on here.
ARM or X86 - Proxmox, non-rolling vs rolling - SBC kit, tower, rack or prebuilt NAS for home use. TDP and wattage. Quicksync. Stay on Linux or hop on over to freeBSD for proper ZFS or fully embrace BTRFS and stay with what I know best. I heard XFS is a thing too…
Going slightly insane weighing all the options against each other and options in different combinations against each other.
Trying to avoid resource and money waste by informing myself enough to make purchases with good longevity.
Many thanks for any input on these matters! :)
borgBackup, a raspberry pi, and an external hard drive. You can spend as much money as you want building a more and more ideal solution, but you’re probably better off setting up something effective, easy, and cheap.
I use cron to run borg on each of my computers which back up over SSH to the raspberry pi, then I use cron to run borg on the raspberry pi which backs up over SSH to a cloud provider.
I’ve tried a number of different backup solutions; this is the simplest and most robust set up I’ve settled on. Disk imaging is definitely better for larger-scale operations where manually re-configuring every failed machine is impractical, but for the small office/home office disk imaging adds more cost and complexity without really saving that much time.
You can simplify that setup by removing the raspi and backing up directly into the cloud. Of course that increases the risk a little.
I was originally going to have a local backup only, so I first set it up without the cloud. Then, I got nervous that my harddrive might die, so rather than reset everything up with separate repos in the cloud, I made a single new repo for the raspberry pi.
The pi also doubles as a NAS server, and I want to backup the content of the server, so I just dump everything to the NAS and push it together.
If your NAS fails, you have to set it up again before you can access any of the other backups? That could be a long time if the hardware breaks.
If I’m desperate for the data in a pinch I can always use borg on any of my computers pull my NAS cloud repo and bypass the raspberry pi.
Idk, it’s not an ideal setup, but It gives me a local backup in addition to a cloud backup.
I think it would be relatively easy to configure it so that each device stores backups in the cloud, and also on the NAS. Then you also dont have a single point of failure (NAS backup not working).
But then I’m duplicating data on the cloud repo and having to pay more for storage. =) It’s only a few dollars more, but I’m frugal to a fault sometimes!
The NAS wouldnt create a backup of the other backups in that case, because that just seems weird to me. On the other had, you are missing a second backup for the NAS data (unless that one only has the backup data).
Borg only deduplicates data contained in the same repo, each of my computers use separate repos because using a single repo for multiple computers is not recommended.
You’re right that I only have one backup of the NAS data, though. I’ve been thinking about buying another drive for RAID 1 on the NAS, but I haven’t done that because it would only be useful in the event that both my drive and the cloud provider fail in the same time frame. I feel like that’s reasonably unlikely.
I see you use borg, too. What is your backup setup?