Hi everyone,

I’m visiting some family in another area of the country soon, and have the opportunity to set up a little remote backup server.

Essentially I would like to set something up that I can ssh into and backup photos/videos/documents from my main server periodically once a month or so. Ideally it would be off until I need to turn it on.

I’m looking for ideas on how to best approach this. What kind of hardware would you use in my shoes? I have a couple of spare raspberry pi’s I was thinking to use with an external drive. I was also considering something like those ugreen nas devices that have been popping up. I would ideally set it up and do a sync before I head there, and then just plug it in. Would wake on lan be advised for this?

  • PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.caEnglish
    4·
    1 day ago

    What are you using for your main backup? It probably has a feature for doing remote backup / duplication. You’re best off using that.

    If you don’t, then I think that’s probably your first order of business. There are a bunch of good COTS NAS devices that support remote backup to a similar device or to the cloud. Synology generally seems to be the easiest to use based on reviews, but recently they’ve been getting picky about hard drive support.

    If you’d rather DIY then there are some FOSS software options to let you build your own NAS and then back it up to the cloud or to a remote device running the same software. These can get pretty complicated from what I can tell (I’m in the process of doing something similar, been researching). Options include OpenMediaVault, and TrueNAS. TrueNAS seems to be “better” but more complicated and easy to fuck up.

    Unraid is also very popular, but it costs money to get a software license. Users swear by it, though.
    And on the outside HexOS - a fork (or maybe alternative front end?) of TrueNAS, by some former Unraid devs, with the goal of making TrueNAS as easy to use as Unraid. But it’s both paid and beta, so probably not a good choice yet.

    These will all allow remote backup to cloud or to a remote device running the same software. They also typically support some kind of virtualization with an app store, so you can use your NAS to host other servers like a media server or immich or home assistant, etc (although app ecosystem abundance will vary).

    Wrt hardware, you’ll have to look up system requirements for the software you want to use. For example, TrueNAS uses ZFS filesystem, which wants a lot of ram if you need it to perform well.
    If your r-pi can run the software you want, then you can get a SATA hat for your pi, to run a couple hard drives. You can also get NAS cases for your pi.
    I probably wouldn’t recommend leaving a mess of cables and parts at your friend’s house across the country, it’s better for both of you if the system is fairly well contained - enough for them to move it without risk of parts getting disconnected.

    • rehydrate5503@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      2·
      1 day ago

      Thanks for the detailed reply.

      So my main NAS is Unraid, and I also have a couple of proxmox boxes. Though I’m less concerned about the proxmox boxes as the main files are on the NAS, and I have a proxmox backup server vm set up on Unraid with regular backups there.

      For most of my important files on unraid, I have an external drive that I periodically sync and store in a safe.

      I also have access to a VPS with over 1TB of space which I am still figuring out how to best integrate into my backup strategy.

      For what I’m asking here, I just want to have a simple solution that I can tuck away and have remote access to and just use syncthing or something to keep it updated.