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?

  • SayCyberOnceMore@feddit.ukEnglish
    1·
    1 day ago

    Wake on LAN won’t work remotely, so you’d either need to have access to a VPN at their location, or have a 2nd always on device that you can connect to and that could then WoL to your device… or… get a device with an IPMI which you remote into. (All non-VPN forms of remote connection are open to abuse)

    I suspect (guess) you’re not going to be able to setup a VPN, so perhaps an always on pi is going to be necessary - so maybe it’ll be that with drives set to spin down when idle?

    OpenMediaVault was my preferred choice until everything went docker on it which was getting too complex for a NAS… so I just created my own, which powers on at certain times of the day and off again when CPU / network IO was low enough.

    Data transfer with syncthing is great, but I don’t really recommend sync for snapshot backups… (consider your files are all corrupted, it’ll happily sync those corruptions) but I have enough space for a few versions of my files, so in theory I can roll back, but it’s cetainly not a Grandfather, Father, Son strategy.

    • rehydrate5503@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      12 hours ago

      Ahh gotcha, I misunderstood that then. I could probably set up a VPN there but don’t want to over complicate it. An always on Pi will be fine I think, they are low power. I could also add a smart switch and set up a schedule or something but I don’t think thats worth the hassle considering the low power usage of a pi.

      Hmmm that’s a good point about syncthing backing up corrupt files. I was thinking to use it because I already use it extensively and I wouldn’t need to mess with port forwarding or anything of the sort.

      I had multiple copies of files previously as a backup “strategy” and it got way out of hand where I have like 1.5m photos lol. What do you recommend as an alternative to syncthing?

      • SayCyberOnceMore@feddit.ukEnglish
        1·
        5 hours ago

        The main point is that sync (like RAID) isn’t a backup. If ransomware got in and started encrypting all your files, how would you know / protect yourself…

        There’s a lot of focus on 3-2-1 backups, so offsite is good, but consider your G-F-S strategy too - as long as this remote copy isn’t your only long-term backup option, then sync might be ok for you

        So, syncthing / rsync / etc is fine… but maybe just point it to your monthly / weekly / daily backup folder(s) rather than the main files?

        You also had some other suggestions I think, like zfs / btrfs snapshots… which would be a point in time copy of your files.

        Or burn the photos to DVD / Bluray and store them at the other location? No power requirements there…