datahoarder

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Who are we?

We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

We are one. We are legion. And we're trying really hard not to forget.

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Recommendations for an inexpensive DIY backup? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 2 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hi there, I've been meaning to go get more serious about my data. I have minimal backups, and some stuff is not backed up at all. I'm begging for disaster.

Here's what I've got: 2 8tb drives almost full in universal external enclosures A small formfactor PC as a server, with one 8tb drive connected. An unused raspberry pi. No knowledge of how to properly use zfs.

Here's what I want: I've decided I don't need raid. I don't want the extra cost of drives or electricity, and I don't need uptime. I just need backups. I want to use what drives I have, and an additional 16tb drive I'll buy.

My thought was that I would replace the 8tb drive with a 16tb one, format it with zfs (primarily to avoid bit rot. I'll need to learn how to check for this), then back it up across the two 8tb drives as a cold backup. Either as two separate drives somehow? Btrfs volume extension? Or a jbod connected to the raspberry pi, that I leave unplugged except for when it's time to sync the new data?

Or do you have a similarly cheap solution that's less janky?

I just want to back up my data, with an amount of rot protection, cheaply.

I understand that it might make sense to invest in something a bit more robust right now, and fill it with drives as needed.

But the thing I keep coming to is the cold backup. How can you keep cold backups over several hard drives, without an entire second server to do the work?

Thanks for listening to my rambling.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

You're welcome.

Yes, you can create a list of files that takes little space, in linux that's just "tree" to produce a list of directories and files (I don't know about Windows, sorry)

But only you can answer what you need to back up. If you judge the effort to re-download this data is more than the effort of backing it up (especially if you're on a slow link), then backing it up makes more sense. Everyone has their own appetite for risk and their own shape of what they can spend in both time and money in sorting this. The important thing is that you're thinking about it before you need it, that's good!