Over the past few months I’ve been thinking about what would be the best way to help me and my parents improve privacy and data storage.
With all the posts with cluster PC’s recently, I’m wondering if the best option is to make a couple of NAS’s with Raspberry Pi’s with RAID, keep one at my place and another at my parents’ house, and syncing their data with 2 private folders: one for myself and one for my parents.
But that opens up a few more questions. How to sync the data to match? Syncthing? Kubernetes? Should I make the Pi’s expandable so other services can be added later, or plan to hook up a separate Pi to handle that? What else could I be missing?
Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 3 weeks ago
Sync is not backup.
Let’s repeat that - sync is not backup.
If your sync job syncs an unintentional deletion, the file is deleted, everywhere.
Backup stores versions of files based on the definitions you provide. A common backup schedule for a home system mat be monthly full, Daily incremental. In this way you have multiple versions of any file that’s changed.
With sync you only have replicants of one file that can be lost through the sync.
unknownuserunknownlocation@kbin.earth 3 weeks ago
Thank you. Now can you please explain this to my IT department that thinks force syncing everything on our computers to OneDrive is a solution to our lack of backups?
foggenbooty@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Well, I mean it kind of is a solution. It’s a cloud backup solution. OneDrive doesn’t just keep a single version of your file, there’s versioning, retention policies, etc.
Cloud makes a lot of sense for businesses with small IT staff and a lot of users because while it’s not fully in your control, it comes with all the things being discussed here “out of the box” and scales infinitely.
For self hosters there’s some fun and power in doing everything yourself, but even then adding cloud as part of your backup (if done securely) is usually a pretty good idea.
mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
You seem to be missing/ignoring that sync will protect against data loss from lost/broken devices. When that happens, those connections are severed with no deletions propagating through them. Not only that, you can configure syncthing to retain older versions for over a year to avoid issues of unwanted edits.
You have to be joking with this. There is no way I’m letting that tracker-filled ransomware near any of my computers.
Simple mirroring doesn’t protect against bitrot. RAID 6 does.
You’re clearly not suited for giving out advice, so you’re getting ignored and blocked. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
suicidaleggroll@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Only if you very carefully architect things to protect against it. I have absolutey seen instances where a drive had a fault and wouldn’t mount on the source, and a few hours later a poorly designed backup script saw the empty mount location on the source and deleted the entire backup. You have to be VERY CAREFUL when using a sync system as a backup. I don’t use syncthing, but if it can be configured to do incremental backups with versioning then you should absolutely choose that option.
I believe he was talking about a mini PC with a single drive, not Microsoft’s “One Drive”.
Lots wrong with this statement. The way you protect against bitrot is with block-level checksumming, such as what you get natively with ZFS. You can get bitrot protection with a single drive that way. It can’t auto-recover, but it’ll catch the error and flag the affected file so you can replace it with a clean copy from another source at your earliest convenience. If you do want it to auto-recover, you simply need any level of redundancy. Mirror, RAIDZ1, RAIDZ2, etc. would all be able to clean the error automatically.