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.

  • DigitalDilemma@lemmy.mlEnglish
    5·
    1 day ago

    A pet subject of mine.

    Firstly - sit down and consider what you need to backup.

    • Tier 1 - unique data. Stuff you created that doesn’t exist elsewhere.
    • Tier 2 - Stuff that would take a few days to repeat. Local configs, etc.
    • Tier 3 - Stuff you can just download again. (Steam library, media etc)

    Don’t backup Tier 3. I’m betting the size of data you need to back up shrinks a lot.

    Secondly - automate it. If there’s anything manual, then you’ll eventually stop doing it. Automate, automate, automate - and throw in some manual or automated checks of the backups to verify they’re actually usable.

    Thirdly - airgap it if you can, and if there’s much Tier 1 data. Offline disks. This gives you some protection against ransomware. Consider the risks and how to protect yourself. Obviously media failure, accidental deletion and ransomware, but also consider theft and fire. Do you really want your backups in the same location? Do they need encryption?

    I wrote quite a long blog on the subject if you’re interested in more.

    • beastlykings@sh.itjust.worksOP
      2·
      1 day ago

      Thanks for this! This is a really rundown.

      One question on the media though. While things like games and media can be redownloaded, that’s a significant effort. And also, how do I know what I’ve lost once it’s gone? Do I backup a directory of what I had somehow? I have a terrible memory, and will forget things ever existed.

      • brygphilomena@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        3·
        20 hours ago

        If I can get it later, personally I don’t back it up. I have lost 100tb of media before and since then I’ve redownloaded most of it. For that stuff, if I forget about it then it wasn’t important. When I care about it, I’ll remember and just go get it then.

        • OminousOrange@lemmy.ca
          3·
          18 hours ago

          I agree with this, though if you have something like Sonarr or Radarr, the titles you have (or had) would all be on there, so reaquiring isn’t quite as significant a task.

          Unfortunately I’ve recently had to put this into practice because I didn’t understand hardlinks and zfs subpools…

          • bigb@lemmy.world
            1·
            17 hours ago

            I recently lost a media drive and Radarr was a godsend. I’ve made database backups a priority. It’s also much easier to recover from a dead drive with access to a private BitTorrent tracker that allows free leeching.

            After I stopped other programs except for Radarr and qBitTorrent, I let those two with for two days and got most of everything back. There are a few more movies that I need to manually recover and I should properly back those up. Besides that, it worked very well.

      • DigitalDilemma@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        1 day ago

        You’re welcome.

        Yes, you can create a list of files that takes little space, in linux that’s just “tree” to produce a list of directories and files (I don’t know about Windows, sorry)

        But only you can answer what you need to back up. If you judge the effort to re-download this data is more than the effort of backing it up (especially if you’re on a slow link), then backing it up makes more sense. Everyone has their own appetite for risk and their own shape of what they can spend in both time and money in sorting this. The important thing is that you’re thinking about it before you need it, that’s good!