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?

  • IsoKiero@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    52·
    15 days ago

    I would consider also the case where something goes wrong. Maybe the whole thing crashes, maybe you misconfigure something, maybe there’s a power outage or something else happens and you lose the connectivity. Is there someone on site who can do anything to your hardware as you can’t easily just go and figure it out by yourself?

    If the answer is ‘no’ then I would strongy reconsider the whole approach. On a worst case scenario the system goes down before you’re even back home from the trip and then your hardware is just gathering dust.

    • nfreak@lemmy.mlEnglish
      2·
      15 days ago

      This scenario is why my offsite backup is primarily a backblaze b2 bucket, while also running a large media backup to an external HDD once a month which I keep in a storage unit. Janky but effective

      Realistically I could coordinate with my brother to set up a backup system at my family’s place but it feels like a hassle

      • rehydrate5503@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
        1·
        14 days ago

        I was thinking about backblaze but the cost would be too high I think, and I have so much spare hardware laying around I may as well use it.

        • nfreak@lemmy.mlEnglish
          2·
          14 days ago

          Depends on how much you use it. Since I don’t use mine for media, mostly for configs and service data folders, I barely scratch 120GB and I’m literally paying under a dollar a month for it right now.

          • rehydrate5503@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
            2·
            14 days ago

            Oh that makes sense, yeah that’s cheap. I have a VPS that has 1TB of storage available, so I can easily use that for configs, dbs, etc. That itself doesn’t have backup enabled, but it’s fine for my needs.

    • rehydrate5503@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      2·
      14 days ago

      This is a good point. The answer in my case is yes, there is someone on site who is tech savvy and can help get it back up and running in the even that something goes down.