External HDD as additional backup

Hello Forum

As part of my backup strategy for my home server, I got myself a refurbished 3TB external drive. The price was very good (45€ for both the drive and Seagate enclosure, Ebay refurbished) so I decided to bite the bullet. The drive seems to be OK (7200 RPM, 0 hours runtime and 4 power on counts) and since it is going to be a secondary backup, I tough I could take the risk.

Now, I am currently using SnapRAID as my first backup (3 data drives plus a parity one) but I wanted to add an additional layer in case the human feces collide with the airflow generating machine. I'll run weekly snapshots of some data in the server (mainly pictures) to the external drive.

My question to you guys is where should the drive hang? I have a secondary server running docker with a bunch of different things. My line of thinking was that it would be "safer" to connect the external drive to the thin client in case my main server suffers a catastrophic failure and, for example, two or more drives kick the bucket. On the other hand, both my OMV server and the thin client sit next to each other in my server rack, which raises the question if it wouldn't be better to connect the external drive directly to my OMV and call it a day.

In addition, if the drive is mounted in OMV as a remote share, do you recommend Samba or NFS?

My apologies in advance if the thread is somewhat absurd, but I have burned more time thinking about it than I would like to admit.

Thanks!

Hello macom, and thanks for the suggestion. I also considered using it as an off-site backup. However, I don't feel like moving the drive back and forth. It is a mechanical drive after all and they are prone to getting damaged while moved around. On top of that, the files on the drive will change relatively often (mostly pictures synced to the server) meaning that I would need to regularly bring the drive home (i.e. once weekly). That's why I am looking for a solution to set and forget, like automated weekly snapshots of the data. I could also sync over the internet, but the outdated German internet infrastructure with 40 mb/s upload speed is holding me back.

Don't take me wrong! I should have also an off-site backup, but that would happen at a later point in time.