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·
    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…?