How to store backups?

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨chevy9294@monero.town⁩ to ⁨selfhosted@lemmy.world⁩

Hi, currently I have a almost none backups and I want to change them. I have a PC with Nextcloud on 500gb ssd that I also use for gaming (1tb system drive). Nextcloud would be used to store/sync images, documents, contacts, and calendar from my phone and laptop. I also have an old pc that has 2x 80gb, 120gb, 320gb, and 500gb hdd. I want to use it for other backups like OS snapshots, programming projects, etc. but its not a big hdd but a lot of small hdds. Should I store each backup on 2 drives? Can I automate this? Any suggestions would be helpful.

source

Comments

Sort:hotnew top

Rootiest@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I really love Kopia.

I mostly use it for cloud backups but it also works great for local/network storage as well.

It’s really fast and efficient, supports cutting edge encryption and compression and the de-duplication and file-splitting features will let you generate frequent snapshots while costing you minimal storage. Snapshots are also effortless to mount.

It’s also cross-platform and FOSS.

source
- rentar42@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Can second Kopia! The deduplication works like a charm.
  
  I've recently started using Immich (previously Google Photos). And since I've backed up a recent Google Takeout archive (unzipped), backing up all of my images in Immich added just a couple hundered megabytes (over ~200GB of images).
  
  I'm personally using https://www.idrive.com/object-storage-e2/ as the target, but any S3 compatible place and many other targets are possible as well.
  
  source
- glasgitarrewelt@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Kopia sounds nice, thanks! I want to back up my Nextcloud to a Nextcloud of a friend. Should be working with Kopia/WebDAV.
  
  source
- chevy9294@monero.town ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Thanks!
  
  My first though was: oh no, thats a KDE app
  
  source
  - Rootiest@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Haha nope not KDE-related afaik!
    
    Just a great FOSS project.
    
    Did I mention it’s also ridiculously fast?
    
    It quite noticeably out-performs any other solution I’ve tried.
    
    source
vegetaaaaaaa@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Don’t use a synchronized folder as a backup solution (delete a file by mistake on your local replica -> the deletion gets replicated to the server -> you lose both copies).

old pc that has 2x 80gb, 120gb, 320gb, and 500gb hdd

You can make a JBOD array out of that using LVM (add all disks as PVs, create a single VG on top of that, create a single LV on top of that LV). But if the disks are old, I wouldn’t trust them as reliable backup storage.

My advice is get a large disk for this PC, store backups on that. You don’t necessarily need RAID (RAID is a high availability mechanism, not a backup). Setup backup software on this old PC to pull automatic daily backups from your server (and possibly other devices/desktops… personally I don’t bother with that. Anything that is not on the server is expendable). I use rnapshot for that, simple config file, basic deduplication, simple filesystem-backed backups so I can access the files without any special software, gets the job done. There are a few threads here about backup software recommendations:

What backup service do you use? - Lemmy.world

What are your backup solutions? - Lemmy.world

How do you guys back up your server? - Lemmy.world

How do you backup things to your server? - Lemmy.world
source
- chevy9294@monero.town ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Thank you for your detailed response! I will checkout JBOD arrays, if that wont work I will probably buy newer larger disks.
  
  source
  - poVoq@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    btrfs has this built in with additional redundancy, so that is by far the better option to combine multiple drives into one large pool.
    
    source
  - vegetaaaaaaa@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    JBOD here just means “show me this bunch of old drives as a single drive/partition”. It’s just a recommendation to at least get something out of these drives - but don’t use this as backup storage , these drives are old and if a single one fails, you lose access to the whole array.
    
    If you’re not sure what to do with them, juste get an USB dock or USB/SATA adapter and treat them as old books, copy not-so-valuable stuff on them, and store them in a bookshelf with labels such as Old movies, Wikipedia dumps 2022…
    
    source
rglullis@communick.news ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
How old are these disks? If wouldn’t trust anything of value to an HDD (better to save them on a bunch of good quality DVDs or BluRay disks than relying on such old disks.

source
- chevy9294@monero.town ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Around 15 years. Should I buy something like 2x 1tb hdd and raid them together?
  
  source
  - bruchsturm@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    If I’ve learned something about selfhosting and backups it is that you can trust HDDs to spin for 3-5 years and should still do backups. I myself do backups to HDDs that are only powered on for these backups. I’m still not sure if thats enougth.
    
    Raid is more for an always-on solution, but not great for safe backups. They still might get damaged at the same time, because you bought them at the same time, from the same vendor and they have the same usage time.
    
    source
    -> View More Comments
  - rentar42@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    One thing that RAID doesn't do is verify the integrity of your data on read. In other words: if you have silent data corruption somewhere you won't notice.
    
    For many use cases that's acceptable, since it doesn't handle often, but personally I don't like it for any kind or achival/backups. That's why I picked ZFS, which stores and verifies checksums even on non-mirrored/non-raid storage. I've added RaidZ2 (similar to RAID 5 with 2 parity disks) on top of it to be able to recover from checksum errors.
    
    source

Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters	More Letters
NUC	Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers
RAID	Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage
SATA	Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage

[Thread #163 for this sub, first seen 24th Sep 2023, 18:15] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

source

lemmyvore@feddit.nl ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Yes, storing each backup in 2+ places is best.

You can of course automate it. If you’re running backups from Linux use anacron rather than cron because anacron tries to run when it can (when the machine turns on), whereas cron doesn’t run again if the machine was off when it was time to run.

rsync is the most straightfoward solution. Pros: it won’t copy files again if they haven’t changed; it can copy remotely over ssh. Con: it has a bit of a learning curve.

BorgBackup would be my next recommendation, it takes distinct backups but doesn’t duplicate files between them. It has compression, encryption (optional) and you can run checks on the backups. Con: for remote use you need to run a borg server on the target machine. Another potential con is that it doesn’t store the files in a directly usable format like rsync. Borg archives are similar to a zip archive – you can list the files, you can extract them, you can even mount them somewhere and then access the files directly – but you can’t access them directly without borg.

source
EngineerGaming@feddit.nl ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I personally don’t use automation, I just have a Veracrypt volume for storing backups and do them manually. Rarely full-system, mostly just home folder.

source
thayer@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I’m sure there are more elegant solutions out there, but here’s my method:

I have an inexpensive hard drive dock connected to my NUC home server via USB (with UASP support). I rotate two large-capacity hard drives between work and home, ensuring that one is always off-site. The drives are wholly encrypted, so I manually decrypt and mount the drive, and run a backup script that pulls any changed data from all devices on the network. I then take that drive to work and bring the other one home.

I have a calendar reminder to do this each month, and I’ll sometimes run a backup in between the usual schedule when we’re working on important projects at home.

source
Nobsi@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
How much data are we talking about? I get confused. Is it 1.5TB or is it 2.5TB?
Then, how backed up do you want to be? Think about if you REALLY need daily backups. While Raid might be cool and flashy; if you don’t need it you don’t need it and running it only creates cost.

If you have about 2 TB of data then i would just buy 3 external HDD of 2TB size and replace them every 5 Years. Then rotate them around every time you do a backup. Can you automate your backups? Not to the point of you not having to do anything. Unless you choose to pay for 2 cloud storage providers and both offer you to save your backups in an unchangeable state.

source