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.

  • Rootiest@lemm.eeEnglish
    12·
    2 years 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 algorithms 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 and it even supports error correction to protect against bit-flipping and other long-term storage risks.

    It’s also cross-platform and FOSS.

    De-duplication prevents duplicate bits of data from being stored twice. Even if they are different file names or even synced from different systems.

    The rolling hash/file-splitting means if you modify a 25GB file and only change a couple MB then only the changed couple MB will need to be stored. This means you can spend a month modifying small parts of a massive file thousands of times and avoid storing a new 25GB file thousands of times to archive those changes.

    • rentar42@kbin.social
      2·
      2 years ago

      Can second Kopia! The deduplication works like a charm.

      I’ve recently started using Immich (I previously used 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.

      Edit: also, don’t discount paying for some cloud storage for backups entirely: I never wanted to do that since I wanted to host it myself, but there’s multiple reasons to have one of your backup targets be a cloud storage (yes, I know I’m in the selfhosted community):

      • it’s definitely physically seperate
      • most cloud storage has incredibly reliable storage (which is hard to replicate on most home-storage-budgets)
      • the cost can be very low even compared to buying disks (I pay 20$/year for 1TB, which can hold all of my valuable data easily, obviously not my “bulk stuff”).
    • glasgitarrewelt@feddit.deEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      Kopia sounds nice, thanks! I want to back up my Nextcloud to a Nextcloud of a friend. Should be working with Kopia/WebDAV.

      • Rootiest@lemm.eeEnglish
        5·
        2 years 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.

  • Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyzBEnglish
    31·
    2 years ago

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

    Fewer Letters More Letters
    NAS Network-Attached Storage
    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

    4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 8 acronyms.

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

  • vegetaaaaaaa@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    2 years 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 VG, create a filesystem on top of that LV, format it as ext4 filesystem, mount this filesystem somewhere, access it over SFTP or another file transfer protocol).

    But if the disks are old, I wouldn’t trust them as reliable backup storage. You can use them to store data that will be backed up somewhere else. Or as an expendable TEMP directory (this is what I do with my old disks).

    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 rsnapshot 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:

    In addition I make regular, manual, offsite copies of the backup server’s backups/ directory to removable media (stash the drive somewhere where a disaster that destroys the backup server will not also destroy the offsite backup drive).

    Prefer pull-based backup strategies, where hosts being backed up do not have write access to the backup server (else a compromised host could alter previous backups).

    Monitor correct execution of backups (my simple solution to that, is to have cron create/update a state file after correct execution, and have the netdata agent check the date of last modification of this file. If it has not been modified in the last 24-25hrs, something is wrong and I get an alert).

  • thayer@lemmy.caEnglish
    1·
    2 years 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.

  • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
    1·
    2 years 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.

      • rentar42@kbin.social
        1·
        2 years 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.

  • EngineerGaming@feddit.nlEnglish
    22·
    2 years 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.