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?
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.
In theory that is solvable by a PiKVM,JetKVM,nankKVM, etc.
It won’t help if your power supply breaks and KVM itself can malfunction too. It’s of course nice to have, but it has limitations.
We are talking about a hobbyist here - if you want to have precautions against all these points OP would need to have a redundant PSU, redundant power sources with automatic failover, backup power,etc. Of course paired with redundant data connections, redundant KVM solutions, physical access management, etc.
In other words: A freaking data center.
Sure, PSUs break. Happens. But very very rarely. And everything else that is on the side of his backup device can be handled through a KVM. And tbh, if that one fails, one can usually direct a “non IT user” to simply pull the plug and put it back on.
Obviously we’re talking about hobbyist level stuff and with that there’s always something what can go wrong and it’s not always obvious what it is. So if the ‘remote end’ doesn’t have someone who can do at least very basic troubleshooting it can be nearly impossible to fix the setup over the phone unless you just replace the whole thing and ship whole units back and forth.
But in this particular case the remote end has someone who knows their stuff so it’s taken care of, with or without a KVM. I’ve been thinking a similar setup with my relatives and on my case the distance isn’t an issue but it’s still something I’d need to bother family members with and, for me, it was simpler to get a storage box from hetzner and run backups to that instead of getting more hardware.
Maintenance is anyways something you need to consider and viable options for that vary on a case-by-case basis, so there’s no ‘one size fits all’ solution.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.