Back up advice

Quote from STUKguy

Hi,

So my OMV server has an Backup USB drive plugged into it which backs up all files once a week.

My question/advice is, is it worth me building a "off site" back up server?

I have about

5GB in documents/personal files

500GB in movies/music

Now I could probably get away with backing up my documents/personal files to my GDrive and leave my movies/music but I know how much of a pain it would be to redownload everything should something happen to my main storage and USB backup drive.

What do you all think?

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That's really a personal question... 500gb isn't a huge amount of data, so I would look at it like this.

Hypothetically, you had a fire today and lost everything... After the shock of losing everything else, how would you feel about your lost data?

If it's, "Meh, major PITA, but I'll live.. my important stuff was in my Google Drive"... then I'd say what you're doing is fine.

If it's, "Man, some of this stuff is old and I don't want to lose it. It will take forever to get IF I can find it again, it's just to big to put on a Google Drive"... then an easy solution, is buy another 500gig drive, and rotate them weekly. Drive A is at home on week 1. Drive B is off site somewhere (parents house, office, whatever). End of week 1, back up to Drive A, and swap with Drive B for Week 2. Make sure Drive B is current at the end of week 2, and swap with Drive A. Rinse and repeat. In this scenario, the offsite backup will only be (at most) 7 days out of date in the event of a total data loss at home.

If it's, "Man, I don't want to lose anything or look for anything twice", then you build a remote backup with some sort of automated backup system.

From the sounds of your post, you're somewhere between 1 and 2.

Hope that helps.

Quote from STUKguy

Hey, yes I am some where between 1 & 2 that's why thought I would get some expert advice from you guys here.

How difficult is it to set up offsite backup server, setting up the OMV is fine it just the connection from property 1 to property 2 I'm not sure about.

Pretty easy as long as you can do some simple port forwarding on the 2nd server. I use an odroid HC2 at my parents house. Truthfully, I don't think they even know it's there.. When I rebuild my home server later this year/early next (and stop putting it off), my plan is to rebuild my offsite backup as well, probably w/ a Pi4, but the procedure will stay the same. Right now I'm using rsync, but when I do the rebuild, my plan is to switch to Syncthing

Set up a Syncthing docker on both devices... ... I did the first sync at home.

Reverse proxy Syncthing at home through my paid domain.

Sign up for a free duckdns domain for the remote server and reverse proxy the backup Syncthing through the duckdns domain. Recently, I also reverse proxy'd a few other services through the duckdns domain, to make it a little easier to keep updated and manage (omv webUI, portainer, wetty). Before, I'd usually just log in to it from my phone while I was visiting, and run updates. This was kind of problematic as sometimes I'd forget, etc. Now, when I run updates on my home server.. I just also log in to the remote server and run updates on it from home. Way easier.

Schedule a time for the backup to run.. I've got it set to 3am right now.

It sounds way more complex writing it than it actually is. It wasn't hard to set up at all. Not the perfect solution.. sometimes my or their internet may be out at 3am, so the sync won't run... maybe a power outage, etc. For the most part however, it has worked well.

Quote from KM0201

Truthfully, I don't think they even know it's there..

Did you hide it in the false ceiling in the bathroom?

I do remote maintenance on my sister-in-law's QNAP NAS. I ended up tapping a 500GB pendrive to save my important data there. But she knows. . I do a backup with duplicati and send it there with rsync and VPN from time to time.

Quote from chente

Did you hide it in the false ceiling in the bathroom?

I do remote maintenance on my sister-in-law's QNAP NAS. I ended up tapping a 500GB pendrive to save my important data there. But she knows. . I do a backup with duplicati and send it there with rsync and VPN from time to time.

LOL, no.

It sits behind a huge ass entertainment center that probably hasn't been moved since I was a kid..lol. They're not moving that thing w/o me or my brothers help, and I know I've not moved it and I can't think of any reason he would have... so like I said.. they probably have no idea it's back there.

Sorry, did not read the complete threat, did you consider backing up to a cloud service like pCloud?

I use Duplicati to perform encrypted, de-duplicated, versioned backups like this.

You get up to 10GB free space for free. There are other similar services. One advantage of pCloud is, that they have server in Europe. But this does not matter to much as the data are encrypted anyway.

Quote from macom

Sorry, did not read the complete threat, did you consider backing up to a cloud service like pCloud?

I use Duplicati to perform encrypted, de-duplicated, versioned backups like this.

You get up to 10GB free space for free. There are other similar services. One advantage of pCloud is, that they have server in Europe. But this does not matter to much as the data are encrypted anyway.

I got the impression he didn't want to pay for a service or he could just pay to upgrade Google Drive.

Yes, but for the mentioned amount of data, you can find free services.

Quote from STUKguy

Thank you all for advice, I already have a Raspberry PI4 and a 4TB drive spare (my OMV server does have a 4TB drive in as my media files will grow eventually) main reason I want to set up a off site backup other than having a back up is also I know I will forget to do physical back ups at the server with setting up resync/sync thing atleast that way I could scheduled a backup and not have to worry about remembering it.

Also is it possible to back up my OMV Server so let's say the worst happens and I need to rebuild my OMV Server, all I would need to is download that back up image and redeploy it? So I don't have to go through the long process of installing everything OMV and all the containers and setting them the way I had them?

Though storing it in the false ceiling sounds like a good idea. 😂

Yes, that is doable. I generally do that part manually however for reasons I'll explain.

I'm assuming you've set up your containers folder on one of your storage drives. So just create a second job, that backs up just your containers, to the remote server. This job, I only do with rsync which is easy to do with the OMV webUI. I do not schedule and simply leave it to run manually only. Reason being, I've found syncing this folder while docker is running, is very problematic and often crashes. Since it doesn't need backed up even daily, I just back it up when I have added containers, etc. When I want to run it, I make sure the remote server is up, kill docker on my server, then run the job. After that, I sync my appdata folder (which is where I keep all my /config directories)... which is also done manually w/ rsync. Once it's done, I restart docker. I've found if I stop docker, then the jobs on these two folders run no problem. If docker is running, it crashes nearly every time and doesn't complete.

Since I don't really need my containers backed up all the time.. pretty much just when I've added a new container or removed one, fixed one, etc. I don't feel it necessary to have "live" backups of that folder. So I typically just run the job once or twice a month when I think about it.

Quote from macom

Yes, but for the mentioned amount of data, you can find free services.

500gigs for free?

Where?

Quote from KM0201

500gigs for free?

Shit. Zeros are really difficult

Quote from STUKguy

KM0201 Thank you I'm going to try and get it set up this weekend.

Hopefully I move into my new place next month at which point all I would need to is change the IP address to reflect the the different locations.

I'm assuming I can use SWAG and duckDNS for the set up?

Well, it depends on what you're going to try.

If you're talking about setting it up locally, then for now, you don't need swag/duckdns. rsync, I do not use swag/duckdns at all, and just open the rsync port (I think it's 873 or something) on the receiving end.. so it's not "secured" in this aspect, but that doesn't typically bother me

If you're talking about using syncthing remotely.. well you can start it locally by just having local IP's/ports for the servers. However to do it remotely (via swag/url) your'e going to need two different public IP addresses unless you start setting up macvlans, etc.

Create your "home" server, set it up through your domain, etc. You can set up the remote location here to, just don't forward it through the domain yet.

Go to the remote location and set up the reverse proxy.. forwarding ports, etc.. in the same manner as you did the host and make sure the sync works.

One thing to keep in mind, especially since you're apparently going to use duckdns at both locations. duckdns ties your account and all it's subdomains, to an IP address... so in order to pull this off, you're going to have to have two duckdns accounts. One for the "home" system.. then a separate duckdns account (not a domain, an account)... that points to the remote IP (there might be a way around this, but I don't think so).

Fortunately that is as difficult to resolve as signing up for a new gmail account and logging into duckdns with it at the remote location.

Quote from STUKguy

If i wanted to set up a back of my (5GB) files to my Gdrive, how do i do that?

My guess would be Duplicati although I have never tried it. macom recommended it in #9 above.

Doesn't Google Drive have a command line client for Linux? I've never used it, but was certain I've seen it (Gdrive, Grive or something). You could probably install it as well to sync whatever you want to Google Drive.

Another option...

https://hub.docker.com/r/mitcdh/google-drive-ocamlfuse/

I've never seen that, I may try that when I have some time Monday/Tuesday.

Edit: Nevermind, that won't work for the OP.. it's only for amd64