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.
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My current backup approach uses Syncthing, but only to replicate all data to a single point, which is then backed up properly.
All mobile devices sync to home, that box is the authoritative data source for everything: mobile devices, user data, media files, etc.
It replicates to two other local data stores (this for quick recovery should a drive/device fail) and is backed up to a cloud service (should I have a catastrophic event).
Its not a perfect 3-2-1 setup, but addresses my risks well enough.
Don’t confuse backups with syncing. Although syncthing has a recycle bin to recover deleted and overwritten files, you shouldn’t rely on it for guarding against accidental deletion, file corruption, or ransomware. You want something that will allow you to restore files from a point in time. There’s lots of proper backup tools for this. Borg, Restic, etc. Each has pros and cons. Make sure you test recovery. Also 3-2-1 is 3 copies of data, on at least 2 different systems, and 1 off site.
*2 different types of media. But having an offsite copy is more important; this part of the rule is mostly just about avoiding failures due to stuff hard drives in the same batch failing at the same time. Or a tape drive that has gone bad and destroys tapes when you insert them, because if that’s the only format you have you’re SOL. If you have another copy on CD then you can use those.
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.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System NAS Network-Attached Storage RPi Raspberry Pi brand of SBC SBC Single-Board Computer
3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 9 acronyms.
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If you’re going for reliability, and you just want things to be simple, you probably just want to spend the money on two cheap NAS boxes, honestly. There are some caveats that come with RPi’s, and you’re unfamiliar it’s: 1) going to cost about the same, 2) be simpler to manage and upgrade, and 3) be easier to repair disk columes when the time comes.
Even if you’re just looking to make these redundant to each other, just make it simple and easy.
Someone down-voted but I agree, and this from actual experience doing stuff similar to OP.
Flexibility, compatibility, and power consumption are significant considerations for a self-hoster.
I’ve run ST with Pi, and while Pi is great, it’s non-standard so doesn’t have the benefit (yet) of ubiquity. While it’s low power consumption is fantastic, mini PC’s and even SFF (Small-Form-Factor) desktops are in the same range for similar costs (in the used market) while providing orders of magnitude more performance per watt and much more hardware compatibility.
A Pi 5 today is in the $120 range - for a device that on it’s own will idle at about 4 watts, with peak draw at 15w. This without any storage yet, and no case.
A mini PC will idle about the same - but can house a large, standard drive so be a much better package for OP’s intended use-case, and cost less on the used market.
I’d maybe add an online backup for the device you’ve chosen to be the authoritative data source to achieve close to a 3-2-1.
The downvotes here are from people who have no idea what in the world actually works best, and just FEEL a certain way about things 🤣
Kinda the mantra of this entire sublem
That sounds fine. I would only say don’t use Syncthing to actually make your backups. My preference and recommendation is restic, possibly combined with the helper utility autorestic.