Comment on How bad of an idea is it to use computing HDDs in a DIY NAS?
glizzyguzzler@piefed.blahaj.zone 3 days agoBackup drive doesn’t need to be anything more than holding your (ideally daily) backup of your main drive(s). It doesn’t need to be powered up and spinning all the time, it can be in the same computer. Spinning up and down causes major wear on hard drives, but I think spinning up once a day for backups is fine and won’t stress it.
For example, have 3 used enterprise drives in my computer case: 2 in BTRFS RAID1 (mirror) as a data drive and 1 with BTRFS as a backup drive. I use snapshotting to mirror the data drive to the backup drive. I then use restic to copy essential data from the backup drive to a remote cloud location (friend’s house with a 4th smaller hard drive - if I did not have a friend with a hard drive I would use hetzner most likely). My Linux ISO’s don’t go remote, but my photos do.
Thus I have immediate redundancy (and bit rot protection) from the BTRFS RAID1 data drives, I have a local full backup with the BTRFS backup drive, and I have my essential stuff far away if the computer explodes or something.
theorangeninja@sopuli.xyz 2 days ago
Thanks a lot, again! I think I will focus on active and backup drive (+remote for the few essentials) and only use RAID if it is easy (and cheap) to implement.
Do you have any tips how to implement the powering on and off automatically? And would it be possible to have both in the same case or is it necessary to separate them physically?
glizzyguzzler@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 days ago
For power on and off automatically, I just rely on Linux’s spin down timer. Which I guess is built in - not sure of anything more specific!