So I’m quite new to the self hosting world, and not the most tech savvy, but I’m looking for a way to expand and increase the reliability of my file storage. I used to just use cloud storage but got concerned about privacy and environmental impact and whittled down all of my data to about 200GB including all my music, photos, movies, backup files, etc. I have a laptop, phone, and mp3 player and currently use synching to sync all of my files across all three devices. This works great, I love how seamless, cheap, and automatic everything is. But I want to expand my storage abilities and include a backup that isn’t with me / in my apartment. I was thinking of getting a couple raspberry pis with m.2 ssds, one to leave at my sisters house (small and unobtrusive little plastic box connected to power and her wifi) and then one at my apartment to act as another node, freeing up space on my phone so that all my files are in at least 3 different devices (3:2:1 rule?). this feels like an fairly easy project to set up, but I have a feeling there is probably a better way to go about what I’m trying to achieve.
As others have said, sync isn’t backup - if you inadvertently delete something then it will get deleted everywhere.
I’ve been using borgmatic (config interface for borg) for many years.
A long while ago I switched to catch and release for media. Curating a large collection just took too much effort, and backing it up was too impractical. Like you probably have 200gb of movies, 20gb of photos, and 20mb of personal documents. These categories have different risk profiles - for me an offsite air gapped backup of movies would be excessive, but personal documents absolutely isn’t. It’s just an important consideration when designing a backup system.
That said, 200gb isn’t that much, and restic / borg will de-duplicate your archives anyway. Just something to keep in mind.
A low powered PC in someone else’s apartment satisfies the second location requirement. Will DNS be a problem?
An alternative is to get 2x external drives. Keep one in your house and update it whenever, then take it to your sister’s whenever you visit and swap it with the one left there.
I agree with everything except the offsite, offline, external drive.
In my experience, cold drives fail more often than live drives, and you get no warning when this happens.
Drives weren’t engineered to be offline but to be powered on continuously. Things like lubricants in the spindle, but especially the read heads pivot were designed around this. How anybody us have heard the click of death - that’s the read head having issues moving.
Plus external drives have heat dissipation problems. They’re good for short, intermittent reads, but when initially copying data to them they can get quite hot. I regularly recover and rebuild drives for family and friends and have registered these things at 120° F+, so I keep an old case fan on them during recovery.