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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • Seems like data integrity is your highest priority, and you’re doing pretty well, the next step is keeping a copy offsite. It’s the 3-2-1 backup strategy, 3 copies, 2 media (used to mean CDs etc but now think offline drives) 1 offsite (in case of fire, meteor strike etc), so look to that, stash a copy at a friends or something.

    In your case I’d look at getting some online storage to fill the offsite role while you’re overseas (paid probably, but a year of 1 or 2 Tb is quite reasonable) leaving you with no pressure on the selfhosting side, just tailscale in, muck around and have fun, and if something breaks, no harm done, data safe.

    I’ve done it for what seems like forever and I’d still be worried about leaving a system out of physical control for any extended period of time, at the very least having someone to reboot it if connectivity or power fails will be invaluable, but talking them through a broken update is another thing entirely, and you shouldn’t make that a critical necessity, too much stress.













  • Sure, but the point of an offline backup is to disconnect it when not in use, rendering it immune to ransomware, accidental deletions, lightning strikes etc. Plug in every week or whatever, do your backup, disconnect, sleep easy. I use an external usb hdd caddy (note that one needs a firmware update to work with bigger disks)


  • MalReynolds@slrpnk.nettoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldBackup solutions
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    1 year ago

    One backup on site on a different medium

    One offline backup.

    Backup on a different medium is archaic advice unless you’re willing to fork $$$ out for a tape drive system. DVDs don’t cut it in the era of 20Tb HDDs. I’d argue that HDD is the only practical media currently for > 4Tb at less than enterprise scale. Backblaze might be considered a different medium I guess.




  • Your biggest bang for buck is with cheap second hand drives, keep a spare on hand to rebuild the array / volume when one dies. You should be aware that the number of drives in the array directly affects the amount of usable space, 2 drives 50% of total available (a direct mirror, to compensate for the loss of one drive), 3 drives you get 66%, 5 gets you 80%. Say you get 6 4Tb drives, keep one as a spare and the remaining 5 will give you 16Tb usable (with one lost to parity so you can survive one disk failure). You then immediately want to save for a 16 Tb external drive for offline, preferably offsite backup (RAID is not Backup!). As others have wisely said, anything can be used to host, but aim at the most power efficient. If necessary get a PCI card for more SATA or SAS ports. Identify high value, small files, documents, current work, personal photos, source code and so forth and arrange for cloud backup, preferably with local encryption so you needn’t trust the cloud provider, preferably in at least two places (so one can go tits up or enshittify without bothering you). You’d be surprised what fits into a free 10Gb account if you triage well.

    Good luck.