Comment on Server for a boat
OneCardboardBox@lemmy.sdf.org 4 months ago
For backup, maybe a blu-ray drive? I think you would want something that can withstand the salty environment, and maybe resist water. Thing is, even with BDXL discs, you only get a capacity of 100GiB each, so that’s a lot of disks.
What about an offsite backup? Your media library could live ashore (in a server at a friend’s house). You issue commands from your boat to download media, and then sync those files to your boat when it’s done. If you really need to recover from the backup, have your friend clone a disk and mail it to you.
Do you even need a backup? Would data redundancy be enough? Sure if your boat catches fire and sinks, your movies are gone, but that’s probably the least of your problems. If you just want to make sure that the salt and water doesn’t destroy your data, how about:
- A multi-disk filesystem which can tolerate at least 1 failure
- Regular utilities scanning for failure. BTRFS scrubs, for example.
- Backup fresh disks kept in a salt and water resistant container (original sealed packaging), to swap any failing disk, and replicate data from any good drives remaining.
- Documentation/practice to perform the aforementioned disk replacement, so you’re not googling manpages at sea.
This would probably be cheapest and have the least complexity.
HumanPerson@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
They said they want a local backup so they don’t have to redownload because bandwidth is expensive. I think a RAID makes more sense. I also don’t think btrfs is a great idea for a boat. Power failures will probably be somewhat common, and btrfs is not the most stable, so I don’t think I would trust it in weird conditions. Documentation is definitely a great idea though.
OneCardboardBox@lemmy.sdf.org 4 months ago
BTRFS should be stable in the case of power loss. That is to say, (it ought to recover to a valid state)[unix.stackexchange.com/…/does-btrfs-guarantee-dat…]. I believe the only unstable modes are RAID 5/6.
I’d recommend BTRFS in RAID1 mode over mdadm RAID1 + ext4. You get checksumming and scrubs to detect drive failures and data corruptions. You also have snapshotting, in case you’re prone to the occasional fat-fingered
rm -rf
.