Hi, currently I have a almost none backups and I want to change them. I have a PC with Nextcloud on 500gb ssd that I also use for gaming (1tb system drive). Nextcloud would be used to store/sync images, documents, contacts, and calendar from my phone and laptop. I also have an old pc that has 2x 80gb, 120gb, 320gb, and 500gb hdd. I want to use it for other backups like OS snapshots, programming projects, etc. but its not a big hdd but a lot of small hdds. Should I store each backup on 2 drives? Can I automate this? Any suggestions would be helpful.
Don’t use a synchronized folder as a backup solution (delete a file by mistake on your local replica -> the deletion gets replicated to the server -> you lose both copies).
You can make a JBOD array out of that using LVM (add all disks as PVs, create a single VG on top of that, create a single LV on top of that VG, create a filesystem on top of that LV, format it as ext4 filesystem, mount this filesystem somewhere, access it over SFTP or another file transfer protocol).
But if the disks are old, I wouldn’t trust them as reliable backup storage. You can use them to store data that will be backed up somewhere else. Or as an expendable TEMP directory (this is what I do with my old disks).
My advice is get a large disk for this PC, store backups on that. You don’t necessarily need RAID (RAID is a high availability mechanism, not a backup). Setup backup software on this old PC to pull automatic daily backups from your server (and possibly other devices/desktops… personally I don’t bother with that. Anything that is not on the server is expendable). I use rnapshot for that, simple config file, basic deduplication, simple filesystem-backed backups so I can access the files without any special software, gets the job done. There are a few threads here about backup software recommendations:
In addition I make regular, manual, offsite copies of the backup server’s
backups/directory to removable media (stash the drive somewhere where a disaster that destroys the backup server will not also destroy the offsite backup drive).Prefer pull-based backup strategies, where hosts being backed up do not have write access to the backup server (else a compromised host could alter previous backups).
Monitor correct execution of backups (my simple solution to that, is to have cron create/update a state file after correct execution, and have the netdata agent check the date of last modification of this file. If it has not been modified in the last 24-25hrs, something is wrong and I get an alert).
Thank you for your detailed response! I will checkout JBOD arrays, if that wont work I will probably buy newer larger disks.
JBOD here just means “show me this bunch of old drives as a single drive/partition”. It’s just a recommendation to at least get something out of these drives - but don’t use this as backup storage , these drives are old and if a single one fails, you lose access to the whole array.
If you’re not sure what to do with them, just get an USB/SATA dock or adapter, and treat them as old books: copy not-so-valuable stuff on them, and store them in a bookshelf with labels such as
Old movies,Wikipedia dumps 2015-2022…Definitely get a good, new drive for backup storage. And possibly another one for offsite backups.
btrfs has this built in with additional redundancy, so that is by far the better option to combine multiple drives into one large pool.