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.

  • 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.