Recommendations for an inexpensive DIY backup?
Recommendations for an inexpensive DIY backup?
Hi there, I've been meaning to go get more serious about my data. I have minimal backups, and some stuff is not backed up at all. I'm begging for disaster.
Here's what I've got: 2 8tb drives almost full in universal external enclosures A small formfactor PC as a server, with one 8tb drive connected. An unused raspberry pi. No knowledge of how to properly use zfs.
Here's what I want: I've decided I don't need raid. I don't want the extra cost of drives or electricity, and I don't need uptime. I just need backups. I want to use what drives I have, and an additional 16tb drive I'll buy.
My thought was that I would replace the 8tb drive with a 16tb one, format it with zfs (primarily to avoid bit rot. I'll need to learn how to check for this), then back it up across the two 8tb drives as a cold backup. Either as two separate drives somehow? Btrfs volume extension? Or a jbod connected to the raspberry pi, that I leave unplugged except for when it's time to sync the new data?
Or do you have a similarly cheap solution that's less janky?
I just want to back up my data, with an amount of rot protection, cheaply.
I understand that it might make sense to invest in something a bit more robust right now, and fill it with drives as needed.
But the thing I keep coming to is the cold backup. How can you keep cold backups over several hard drives, without an entire second server to do the work?
Thanks for listening to my rambling.
You're viewing a single thread.
I got an external ORICO USB hard drive dock and two 3.5" hard drive cases (also by Orico). Every month or so, I plug them in and rsync files over. I'm lucky that one specific folder is about the size of one drive, so I just manually split them. There's probably a better way to do that if you don't have an obvious split.
Then the 3.5" drives in their colorful cases go into a fireproof safe in the basement. I also added another pair for semiannual backups that go to my inlaws.
I used to mail a drive to a relative in a different state with all the media that I created. Offsite ftw in case of natural disaster.
What sort of media?
Music that put together in Logic Audio.
Does rysnc merge files and folders? I think that's the key I'm missing
Rsync will compare the contents of the source directory with the target directory. If it finds a match, it won't copy the files, if there's no match, it copies.
If your goal is to have 1:1 copies, you can use the --delete flag to remove extraneous files in the target directory that aren't in the source directory.
If you use the -a flag, it'll maintain all of your permissions.
You can literally rsync a linux installation from one machine to another. While the source machine is running. Pretty nuts.
This is super helpful, thanks!
One thing to note that I just learned!
If you rsync over a network, you need to be careful. While you might sude rsync -a to maintain file ownership on the sending side, the receiving side will not be a superuser and therefore will be unable to make files owned by other users.
If you add "--rsync-path "sudo rsync" in the ssh version of the command, it'll tell the receiving side to use sudo which will allow it to maintain file ownership when storing the files.
Good to know!