Hi there, I’ve been meaning to go get more serious about my data. I have minimal backups, and some stuff is not backed up at all. I’m begging for disaster.
Here’s what I’ve got: 2 8tb drives almost full in universal external enclosures A small formfactor PC as a server, with one 8tb drive connected. An unused raspberry pi. No knowledge of how to properly use zfs.
Here’s what I want: I’ve decided I don’t need raid. I don’t want the extra cost of drives or electricity, and I don’t need uptime. I just need backups. I want to use what drives I have, and an additional 16tb drive I’ll buy.
My thought was that I would replace the 8tb drive with a 16tb one, format it with zfs (primarily to avoid bit rot. I’ll need to learn how to check for this), then back it up across the two 8tb drives as a cold backup. Either as two separate drives somehow? Btrfs volume extension? Or a jbod connected to the raspberry pi, that I leave unplugged except for when it’s time to sync the new data?
Or do you have a similarly cheap solution that’s less janky?
I just want to back up my data, with an amount of rot protection, cheaply.
I understand that it might make sense to invest in something a bit more robust right now, and fill it with drives as needed.
But the thing I keep coming to is the cold backup. How can you keep cold backups over several hard drives, without an entire second server to do the work?
Thanks for listening to my rambling.
Thanks for the recommendations, especially used drives. I was looking at water panther drives because of their warranty. Do you have a preferred source?
That’s a fair point about off-site backups. Though as this point, any backups at all would be much better than what I’ve got. Baby steps 🤷♂️
Plug them in and move them there? Sorry I’m confused. Cold backups have to be disconnected and unpowered, right? I could keep them bare, and plug them into a dock sequentially, but what does that look like on the software side?
And yeah, my needs are very light. A used optiplex would be plenty. Right now I’m using an m920q with an 8th Gen i5. While it doesn’t have drive bays, it idles at like 10 watts, full tilt is 25. Plus it’s small and silent, I’m in an apartment.
I’m not opposed to upgrading in the future, I guess I just want to get a handle on some basics with what I have, before I decide what I want.
I mean I’ve got a spare computer sitting around with a 2600x in it, that could be a server pretty easy, maybe I’ll look into that 🤔
At any rate, what do you think about the software side of things? Specifically the basic procedure for updating cold backups?
https://serverpartdeals.com/ Is frequently recommended as reliable and with a good warranty. When I first started I got my from a local electronics recycler with only a 30 day warranty. I was only caring about price. Now I’m just using bigger used ones. My only warranty is them being cheap to free and backing up data multiple places.
I agree it’s a bigger step. I currently only have one at my office and it took me forever to get around to setting it up.
I mean just plug them in to your computer or server then move your data. If it was me I would rsync-avz source destination the data :)
An Optiplex only has one maybe two bays. But the low power and cost are worth it!
I think it really doesn’t matter what hardware you have as long as it won’t randomly break.
Maybe I’ll give my specific example. I have a QNAP 1u server that was given to me so I decided to use it as a cold backup. I turn it on once a week and then ssh into my main servers and rsync important data into their respective locations on the QNAP.
If I was making a new system I would make a fedora server 41 usb, install that to a new system using the gui, restart it and ssh in to setup my folder structure, then rsync ally stuff there and be done :) Would probably take less than 30-60 minutes to setup