Hi everyone,

I’m visiting some family in another area of the country soon, and have the opportunity to set up a little remote backup server.

Essentially I would like to set something up that I can ssh into and backup photos/videos/documents from my main server periodically once a month or so. Ideally it would be off until I need to turn it on.

I’m looking for ideas on how to best approach this. What kind of hardware would you use in my shoes? I have a couple of spare raspberry pi’s I was thinking to use with an external drive. I was also considering something like those ugreen nas devices that have been popping up. I would ideally set it up and do a sync before I head there, and then just plug it in. Would wake on lan be advised for this?

  • SayCyberOnceMore@feddit.ukEnglish
    1·
    1 day ago

    The main point is that sync (like RAID) isn’t a backup. If ransomware got in and started encrypting all your files, how would you know / protect yourself…

    There’s a lot of focus on 3-2-1 backups, so offsite is good, but consider your G-F-S strategy too - as long as this remote copy isn’t your only long-term backup option, then sync might be ok for you

    So, syncthing / rsync / etc is fine… but maybe just point it to your monthly / weekly / daily backup folder(s) rather than the main files?

    You also had some other suggestions I think, like zfs / btrfs snapshots… which would be a point in time copy of your files.

    Or burn the photos to DVD / Bluray and store them at the other location? No power requirements there…

    • rehydrate5503@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      6 hours ago

      I didn’t consider that, excellent point. Forgive my ignorance because I’m not certain how the backup systems work, and feel free to ignore this if you don’t know. I presume they compare some metadata or hash of a file against another file and then decide if it’s the same or not to back up? Let’s say I have a file that I have already backed up, and then there is some ransomware that encrypted my files. Would the back up software make a second copy of the file?

      So for most of the important files, I just do a sync to an external drive periodically. Basically when I know there have been a lot of changes. For example I went on a trip last year and came back with nearly 2 TBs of photos/videos. After ingesting the files to unRAID, I synced my external drive. Since I haven’t done much with those files since that first sync, I haven’t done the periodic sync since then. But now you’ve opened my eyes that even this could be a problem. How would the G-F-S strategy work in this case?

      I thought about zfs or btrfs but my Unraid array is unfortunately xfs and it’s too large at this point to restart from scratch.

      Haha that would be a lot of blurays.