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·
    3 days ago

    Wake on LAN won’t work remotely, so you’d either need to have access to a VPN at their location, or have a 2nd always on device that you can connect to and that could then WoL to your device… or… get a device with an IPMI which you remote into. (All non-VPN forms of remote connection are open to abuse)

    I suspect (guess) you’re not going to be able to setup a VPN, so perhaps an always on pi is going to be necessary - so maybe it’ll be that with drives set to spin down when idle?

    OpenMediaVault was my preferred choice until everything went docker on it which was getting too complex for a NAS… so I just created my own, which powers on at certain times of the day and off again when CPU / network IO was low enough.

    Data transfer with syncthing is great, but I don’t really recommend sync for snapshot backups… (consider your files are all corrupted, it’ll happily sync those corruptions) but I have enough space for a few versions of my files, so in theory I can roll back, but it’s cetainly not a Grandfather, Father, Son strategy.

    • rehydrate5503@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      2 days ago

      Ahh gotcha, I misunderstood that then. I could probably set up a VPN there but don’t want to over complicate it. An always on Pi will be fine I think, they are low power. I could also add a smart switch and set up a schedule or something but I don’t think thats worth the hassle considering the low power usage of a pi.

      Hmmm that’s a good point about syncthing backing up corrupt files. I was thinking to use it because I already use it extensively and I wouldn’t need to mess with port forwarding or anything of the sort.

      I had multiple copies of files previously as a backup “strategy” and it got way out of hand where I have like 1.5m photos lol. What do you recommend as an alternative to syncthing?

      • SayCyberOnceMore@feddit.ukEnglish
        1·
        2 days 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·
          20 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.

          • SayCyberOnceMore@feddit.ukEnglish
            1·
            14 hours ago

            It depends on the sync / backup software

            Syncthing uses a stored list of hashes (which is why it takes a long time for the initial scan), then it can monitor filesystem activity for changes to know what to sync.

            Rsync compares all source and destination files with some magical high speed algorithm

            Then, backup software does… whatever.

            Back in the day on FAT filesystems they used the archive bit on each file’s metadata, which was (IIRC) set during a backup and reset with any writes to that file. The next backup could then just backup those files.

            Your current strategy is ok - just doing an offline backup after a bulk update, maybe it’s just making that more robust by automating it…?

            I suspect you have quite a large archive as photos don’t compress well, and +2TBs won’t disappear with dedupe… so, it’s mostly about long term archival rather than highly dynamic data changes.

            So that +2TB… do you drop those files in amongst everything else, or do you have 2 separate locations ie, “My Photos” + “To Be Organised”?

            Maybe only backup “MyPhotos” once a year / quarter (for example), but fully sync “To Be Organised”… then you’ve reduced risk, and volume of backup data…?